A Portrait of the Writing Process: Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood
Chew-Bose approaches the word essay less as a noun and more as a verb.
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Only Patricia Lockwood Could Get Away with Priestdaddy
As we know from her poetry, Lockwood’s humor can shape-shift into something else entirely, something quite moving.
The Teenage Girl in All of Us: Last Sext by Melissa Broder
Last Sext captures a youthful, hard, myth-informed, sleep deprived, aroused, spiritually searching, self-loathing worldview embraced by many of the young women in our lives.
Fantasy Is a Writer’s Most Powerful Weapon: Literature Class, Berkeley 1980
The reality of the horror cannot be put into words, cannot be realistically described; it can only enter through imagination.
Living Outside the Narrative in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot
The Idiot dramatizes the alienation, and even heartbreak, of losing the narrative thread of your existence.
What It Means to Hold and Be Held in Jennifer Givhan’s Protection Spell
The book explores ambiguities—in terms of race, in terms of motherhood, but especially in terms of the body and the subconscious.
The Myth of the Troubled Female in Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
Sometimes it's necessary to shift one's moral compass, and sometimes it's necessary to destroy it.
The Lucky Ones Are Those Who Do Not Disappear
Pachico offers is an anthropological view of small, beautifully evoked human experiences—an ethnography of survival, memory, and nostalgia.
Lines Like Poems unto Themselves: Anthony Madrid’s Try Never
My favorite poems in this book aren’t my favorites because of what they say or do as poems, but because they have the best individual lines.
Celebrating Failures in Nell Stevens’s Bleaker House
Who has time for Writer Problems in the midst of all these PROBLEMS?
Science Is Sexy in There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You
In the first story of this collection, a girl learns the shocking truth that the world is made of atoms, that “when you get right down to it, it’s all just studs and holes.”
Ariel Levy’s Queer Generation
The playful sense of shifting identity applies to feminists, to writers, to anyone who chooses to believe we can reinvent ourselves.