Features & Reviews
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Naked in DC
Craig Seymour is funny, precise, and egoless: the perfect combination for a good sex worker memoirist.
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Todd Zuniga: The Last Book I Loved, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
For a great while I’ve been away from reading short stories of real length—instead flipping back through Etgar Keret’s The Nimrod Flipout for three-page jolts of inspiration. But when I read Tower’s “Retreat” at a cafe in Brooklyn, I couldn’t…
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To Err Is Human
A memoir of the war in Afghanistan asks questions about war and responsibility and what it means to be an American after 9/11.
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Ari Messer: The Last Book I Loved, The Changing Light at Sandover
I hate agreeing with Harold Bloom. But what can I say? I fall easily and oddly and often (if sceptically) into Bloom’s spells of (particular) historical illumination and (annoying) lucidity.
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Zogg
Children’s books have always presented, in a sense, a kind of unique menace. They are among the first lengthy exposures that our children have which are dedicated to learning language. And yet, far more than most adult reading material, children’s…
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I Married a Novelist
“What’s it like to be married to another writer?” Someone asks this question, with varying degrees of fascination, every time I do a reading. It’s as predictable as the person who laughs in all the wrong spots, or the question about…
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Poems Out Loud
For National Poetry Month, Poems Out Loud is featuring people reading their favorite poems aloud. The construction worker who describes his job as “a lot of digging” loves Walt Whitman, and not just because he writes about “common Americans” and…
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The Last Book I Loved: The Glass Castle
The problem with reading a modern memoir is that often they suck. The influx of reality shows and confessional writing (ahem, Tori Spelling) has placed an emphasis on story and less on literary craft. This is why when I read…
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Looking for a Hole to Hide In
Illustrator Nat Russell can’t remember a time he didn’t draw. Taking in Peanuts and Mad Magazine like popcorn and then the works of printmaker Antonio Frasconi and Ben Shahn, Russell’s lines show their roots in those great illustrators as…