book review
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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.
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Saturday Rumpus Poetry: A Poem-Review of Milk Black Carbon and Whereas
And in the silence of the night the small sound of small feet making their way into words.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Celebrating Failures in Nell Stevens’s Bleaker House
Who has time for Writer Problems in the midst of all these PROBLEMS?
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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.”
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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.
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Biblical Rebels and Romantics in The First Love Story
Adam and Eve are the Bible’s most infamous couple: Bonnie and Clyde, year zero.
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The Strangely Plausible Abyss of American War
In Akkad’s dystopian scenario, the US faces a resurgent Mexico and a vast and newly powerful North African-Arabian empire.