Features & Reviews Archives - Page 49 of 775

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.

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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.

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When To Believe an Unreliable Narrator: Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts

The aestheticization of violence in literature, like other representations, can be deceiving.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“Yes” as Signature and Grounding: Hannah Emerson’s The Kissing of Kissing

In this experience of oneness . . . Emerson invites comparisons to mystic poets. And like them, Emerson breaks from her singular experience to take on some of life’s biggest questions: What does it mean to be human? Why do we exist?

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Witches, Mushrooms, Collective Voices, and Catalan: A Conversation with Irene Solà and Mara Faye Lethem

Remember the little green dolls in Toy Story that live in a vending machine, the claw is their god and they go “The Claw!” and cower away? I imagined the mushrooms in the same way, except their claw is the rain.

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A Guidebook for Liminal Times: Martin Shaw’s Smoke Hole

These are liminal times. You must have this book at your side.

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Solace in Writing About the End of the World: An Interview with Mike Meginnis

The most beautiful thing I can think of to do with one’s life is to write a novel, even as I feel really ambivalent about the utility of doing it, about the value to myself and to society and to my local community of having written a book.

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