Novelists rarely engage in typographic adventures. There are exceptions, some of impressive vintage. Laurence Sterne depicts death with a black page in Tristram Shandy. Late-twentieth-century Scottish writer Alasdair Gray (also…
It’s 1990. I’ve shut the door to my bedroom, like any self-respecting teenage girl, to listen to my new CD—the one I ordered for a penny from one of those…
Love, InshAllah, a new collection of essays about romance, love, and sex by Muslim American women, proves that love and faith can live in the same house.
I’m fat. No matter where it stations itself then—against the sunset, unto the dawn, in the most awake and aware of lights at the gas station or drive-thru—my silhouette is…
Bibliophysicists now speculate that no less than three parallel versions of Jonathan Franzen can coexist at any given moment, and the variant, some say, could be much higher. This assortment…
Every once in a while, when I’m reading something, sorting through the words in a half-daze, my brain will just click. I’ll get it. I’ll take on an understanding of…
There’s an inherent need to stitch together a war veteran’s memory because narratives made of memories are otherwise fragmented. This is the tragedy of a war story—that the wholeness will…
Love, An Index tells a beautiful and heartbreaking story, and at the heart of it is some of the most original and interesting poetry that I’ve come across in a…
Reading Leni Zumas’s debut novel The Listeners puts one in mind of the Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919. Not because the novel is messy—it isn’t—but because it contains the same…
Newly appointed Washington State Poet Laureate, Kathleen Flenniken, recently released a second book called Plume, part of the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series of University of Washington Press. I will admit,…