Life is Damage: A Conversation with Claire Messud
If you’re interested in character, then you’re interested in perspective, and intimacy, and in the distinctions—and distance—between one person’s mind and another’s.
Features & Reviews
9282 posts
Reading Achy Obejas’s BOOMERANG/BUMERÁN as Indelible and Recursive Testimony
A review of BOOMERANG/BUMERÁN, a bilingual poetry collection from Achy Obejas available now from Beacon Press.
A Breathtaking and Terrifying Expanse: Quan Barry’s When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East
“The distances are staggering. It could take you an hour to drive to a spot on the edge of the horizon, yet that spot feels like it’s just within reach,” Barry writes. “This is what it means to live on the steppe. There are no walls between you and nature. You are nature.”
Running Straight Into the Devastation: Reyna Grande Goes to War
Reyna Grande is the author of several books, including the bestselling memoir, The Distance Between Us, (Atria, 2012) and the sequel, A Dream Called Home, released in 2018. Her latest novel, A…
What to Read When You Want to Bend Time
The works . . . interrogate time in text through myriad forms, playing with and revealing its machinations all through inventive means. Like the waves and fragments of memory, many of them swerve outside the lines of stiff categorization.
Candy from Strangers: A Conversation with Jennifer Egan
We can try to perform our inner lives, but we can't actually reveal them. We can create a simulacrum, which is so much of what I see on social media, and that simulacrum is entertainment. It’s exciting because we all love the whiff of authenticity, and the more mediated our culture feels, the more we crave it, but we can't actually give it away. We cannot actually break through the barrier of our individual aloneness.
When To Believe an Unreliable Narrator: Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts
The aestheticization of violence in literature, like other representations, can be deceiving.
The Subconscious Repository of Weird Things: A Conversation with Ananda Lima
Poetry allows me to say the thing without a million conjectures. It leaves a lot of space and allows words to resonate and connect without me having to take you there . . . because of the conventions of poetry, I can say things that are understood as a gate to the truth.
Looking for Trouble: A Conversation with Maud Newton
Are these stories true? Did my great grandfather really kill someone with a hay hook? Was my other great grandfather really a communist?
The Scent of Man: Cameron MacKenzie’s River Weather
That I find these characters sympathetic, that I wish them whole while assuming they will never be: This is the beauty and frustration MacKenzie has so elegantly combined. It is easy to hate these men, but I have loved them.
Doomscrolling in Novel Form: A Conversation with John Elizabeth Stintzi
You'll really love this book if you have the opinion that reality is weird. And if you think, like me, that the fact that so many people believe that there’s even a steady thing that we could call reality is fucking insane. If that's who you are, this book is definitely for you.
What to Read When You Want to Be a Patch of Moss
There is pleasure in being seen and there is pleasure in disappearing. Wade in to the swamp, pull out a book, wipe off the slime and sit on the edge to become invisible.