Calibrations: On Niina Pollari’s Path of Totality
Throughout the collection New York City reflects a unique landscape of loss, a space as full of grief as it is of everyday life, scientific facts, memory, motherhood, healing, love, and hope.
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The Young Girl Writes Back: Elif Batuman’s Either/Or
If she just wrote about her own life, perhaps she could produce something that rivals Portrait of a Lady. Yet none of the books she reads are actually written by women.
Wrestling with Ghosts: Joseph Han’s Nuclear Family
“Mostly,” this novel warns us, “the dead are at peace. But when they are not, this is when they may ask something of us, attempt to guide our lives to fulfill what they could not.”
Forms of Narrowing: Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers
After the memorials, the funerals, the endless influx of flowers and casserole dishes and well-meaning texts, the collective retreats back into their lives and all that is left is the individual, grieving for months and years and perhaps even the rest of their own life.
Between the Lands of the Living and the Dead: When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
. . . as the St. Bernard women in Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s debut novel When We Were Birds have understood from generation to generation, the dead need to stay dead . . .
An Open Letter in Lieu of a Review: on Still Life by Jay Hopler
. . . there’s some vital aspect to a person even the approach of oblivion can’t erase.
Swallowing the Darkness: Gag Reflex by Elle Nash
““i’m soft-skinned but my bones have hardened calcium deposited cartilage, the fat around my heart lithified with the carnage of constrictors around tiny mice ribs, squeezed till it removes the soft mealy insides. sucked out by standards i will never reach. by these industry snakes."
Text Colliding with Text: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Much of the novel questions what constitutes a life: If it’s reduced or subverted or is itself a simulation, is it still worth living?
A Love Language for the Menstruating Body: Chloe Caldwell’s The Red Zone
Above all, The Red Zone is a story of intimacy and love, in both substance and form.
From the Archive: Propelled by Questions: Animal by Dorothea Lasky
The animal spirit of poetry brings us closer to our own humanity.
We Must Tell Stories: On Time and Water by Andri Snaer Magnason
"This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and we know what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it."
From the Archive: Sketch Book Reviews: How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy
An illustrated review of Sumana Roy’s new essay collection, HOW I BECAME A TREE!