Close Reads
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Each Of Us A Pale Blue Dot
An alien observes the little H-shaped space station orbiting an increasingly dilapidated earth and wonders, What are these humans up to? “Why do they go nowhere but round and round?” it asks, proverbially. It’s a good question. One that the…
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A Bloody Brilliant Sentence: Erotic Linguistics in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”
…I had not yet read horror written by another woman with such a rich, arresting evocation of female sexuality.
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Sugar Factory
Though I can’t prove Haines wrote “On the Sly” about or even in Toronto—though the timing seems to line up with her and Shaw meeting here in the late 90s—somehow everything about this city seems packed into that line about…
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Immigrant Experience as an Oedipal War of Words in Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects
Words that do not match their peers or adhere to linguistic rules and expectations are the driving trope for the discordance of the immigrant experience in this novel.
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“A Path to Happiness”: Commemorating Sex in Patrick Nathan’s The Future Was Color
Happiness, however temporary and intermittent, is emphasized as vitally important in the cited paragraph and throughout the novel, a rarity in a world steeped in destruction.
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Back into The Garden: The (Re)turn at the End of Ross Gay’s Poem “To the Mulberry Tree”
Close Reads is an essays column exploring a specific page, paragraph, or sentence from a book, film, piece of music, or other media.