Essays
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Unwriting the Great American Novel: Helen DeWitt’s “Your Name Here”
The myth of the PDF is this: it is an unpublishable novel, circulated online after DeWitt despaired of getting it out by conventional channels. When I talked to my old coworker, it seemed shrouded in mystery. He didn’t even refer…
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White Tongue
It was senior year of high school, and a statistics study session slowly devolved into a friend and I commiserating about the shortcomings of Duolingo: there was no Tagalog course for English learners. She was the only Filipino person I…
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Cycles and Stasis: On Nanae Aoyama’s A Perfect Day to Be Alone
A Perfect Day to Be Alone follows Chizu, a 20-year-old trying to make a living in her hometown by working a series of part-time jobs. When her single mother leaves Japan for a yearlong fellowship in China, Chizu moves to…
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In Search of Light
Jacob and I drive up into the rocky plateau surrounding town, then wander further along the highway until the lights of homes vanish. Still unfamiliar with the geography of the town, we’re unsure where to spot the aurora.
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Orientation
At the time, though, I couldn’t make much sense of anything. So I accepted everything with the detached nonchalance of a guy who has no idea what’s going on.
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A Donne for Our Times: on Deed by torrin a. greathouse
Worlds cannot be built from scratch, though, and many of greathouse’s poems find building blocks in existing works. These uses go beyond mere reference and reveal new resonances in even the most familiar sources
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On Exteriority: David Szalay’s “Flesh”
After a few more one-liners, it becomes clear István is living in pandemic-era England (he vapes now, etc.) and trying to log on to a Zoom meeting with his therapist
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Finding Baldwin
The books are on the floor, side by side. I begin to pick them up one by one. Lying beneath two old books is this one. The author’s name screams in white on a red strip at the top of…
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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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The Rumpus Prize in Nonfiction, First Place: Daniel B. Summerhill
A tight plot of land with poverty gripping the neck of its residents even tighter. The same way America held off on recognizing street gangs as an issue until blood was spilt outside of the hood in 1988 in Westwood…
