Features & Reviews
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Scout Finch Will Outlive Us All: Harper Lee’s “The Land of Sweet Forever”
… there’s no new work here, only archives with a pretty cover
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Writing Their Story: A Conversation with Melissa Lucashenko
I do aim to be funny and writers and booksellers tell me that my work usually is. It’s partly to soften the blow, make the hard facts of history palatable. But just as important – if not more important—is the…
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Miracle of the Ordinary: A Review of Ada Limon’s “Startlement”
Ada’s storytelling can be painstakingly slow and suspenseful, weaving through multiple plots and timelines. But it never fails to engage.
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Risk, Transgression and the Loyalty to Art: A Conversation with Sally Mann
“I’m still taking the picture of the road going over the hill, and when I see the road going over the hill, I screech to a stop and take it. The burden is to figure out the new way to…
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The Shackles of Crime: John J. Lennon’s “The Tragedy of True Crime”
There are more sides to a person than a prison sentence can reveal.
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The Object of Our Attention: Marisa Meltzer’s ‘It Girl’
…what is it? And can it explain why Birkin’s life is the one we are currently examining, when there are so many others out there who likewise deserve to be “at the center of [their] own narrative”?
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A Poem Invites You, Warns You, and Then Confounds You: A Conversation with Adedayo Agarau
In The Years of Blood, though, I think what is critical is the multiple selves that exist in the collection. The I resists a single voice—sometimes dead, other times, alive and in fear—and I think that, that is fascinating to…
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On Dante Alighieri’s ‘Paradiso,’ a new translation by Mary Jo Bang
Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Dante Allighieri’s Paradiso by Copper Canyon Press, 2025 displays the enduring power of this classic work of Western literature. For such an old text, a contemporary reader might be surprised by Paradiso’s continuing relevance. Dante…
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Permanent Knots and Anti-Colonial Archives: A Conversation with Daniela Catrileo
When Chilco appeared in my life, I didn’t know it was going to be a novel. I told my friends I thought I was writing a poem that had just gone on too long, a poem in free prose that…
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The End is the Place We Begin: A Conversation with Marissa Davis
I remember, too, reading some time ago someone describe Black Americans as being part of a post-apocalyptic culture. We’ve survived the worst: the belly of the slave ship; the tortures wrought upon generation after generation of our ancestors for centuries.…
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JOYRIDE: A Conversation with Susan Orlean
Taking stock of her own life, she writes about what hurt, what thrilled, and what shaped her. The result is a rare behind-the-curtain view of the golden age of journalism, interwoven with glimpses of Orlean’s childhood, her evolution as a…
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Joining the World: A Conversation with Patricia Lockwood
“A lot of pandemic novels were about a place where everyone could get away from it and not directly have to deal. I totally understand that, but as a person who was writing about it from the very beginning, probably…