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I have known the poet Elizabeth Metzger since kindergarten—and ever since I have known her, she has been a poet. When we played the The Game of Life, a board game, she wrote small lyrics about the futures we ended the game with; when I had a crush, she wrote light verse about the boys […]
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Danniel Schoonebeek discusses living a quiet life in the Catskills, the importance of travel, partying in the woods with poets, and how capitalism forces people to be cruel to each other.
...moreWhen I loved him it felt like light / Coming out of my skin. I don’t mean this / In a good way. In the Boston Review, Lisa Olstein provides a lovely prelude to a sampling of devastatingly beautiful poems by Meg Freitag. Olstein writes: “This third place—between (both) real and unreal, given and taken, […]
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Ben Fama talks about his first full-length poetry collection, Fantasy, the New Narrative movement, and the worst thing that could happen at the Chateau Marmont.
...moreJust in time for Valentine’s Day, Alissa Nutting has given us the story of a woman with a transparent panel covering her beating heart. Her story, “The Transparency Project,” arrived via Guernica online post on Tuesday. This story revives the playful Nutting of her 2010 story collection, Unclean Jobs for Girls and Women, after her […]
...moreReviewing Ann Lauterbach’s new collection of poems, Under the Sign, Jo Ann Clark argues for a new poetics of “radical caring.” The collection shows Lauterbach struggling with the demons of world where people grow increasingly alienated from one other: drone strikes, school shootings, environmental destruction. If, as the poet claims, “to make something is to […]
...moreLeesa Cross-Smith’s debut story collection, Every Kiss a War, dropped last week from Mojave River Press. Written in the second person, her incantatory response reads like a spiritual to-do list, almost a story in itself. Try a sip: Drink red wine, cold. Buy cheap beer and sparklers. Wear a skirt and cowboy boots. Kiss in an empty […]
...moreFor the Boston Review, Leland de la Durantaye assesses the latest edition of Proust’s Swann’s Way. Writing more than just a book review, Durantaye outlines some of Proust’s early struggles, as well as his lasting legacy, and delves into the finer points of the art of translation.
...moreProminent Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie sparked outrage in the African literary community last week with comments she made about the Caine Prize, a prestigious annual award for African writers. Adichie said many things in her fascinating, no-nonsense Boston Review interview with Aaron Bady, but it was this dismissal that angered many: “But I haven’t even […]
...moreIn an extensive two–part Boston Review interview, Paula M.L. Moya talks with Junot Díaz about race and gender in his writing, emotional decolonization, and Monstro, his novel in progress. “There’s that old saying: the devil’s greatest trick is that he convinced people that he doesn’t exist. Well, white supremacy’s greatest trick is that it has convinced […]
...moreMatt Runkle interviews Richard Nash for the Boston Review, who ran Soft Skull Press for eight years. Now he’s heading two other publishing ventures, Cursor (an online literary community where writers can post/discuss manuscripts) and their first imprint, Red Lemonade. It’s awesome to hear publishers say stuff like, “I’m tremendously optimistic about the future of […]
...moreInternationally, labor unions have a weaker presence. Making up for this slack are the non-governmental organizations that support health initiatives, women’s rights and ebb environmental degradation, etc. The presence of NGOs internationally, even with a history of positive consequences, have been facing governmental tensions over dealing with controversial issues, like food security or anti-corruption activist […]
...more“One of the things that has seduced people into giving up on their own actions is the claim of emergency—the government will often make the spurious claim that because certain things require very fast action, there is no time for ordinary processes of deliberation and thinking, and therefore we have to abridge our normal protocols. […]
...moreWestern European politics have been taking the anti-multiculturalism route, policies that change the scope of immigration, religious tolerance and cultural diversity. The Boston Review discusses what multiculturalism means is Europe and the three “objects,” or facets that confused in European politics. “Blaming multiculturalism may be politically useful because of its populist appeal, but it is […]
...moreWith newspapers folding and cutting corners all around the country, it’s easy to give up entirely on the fourth estate. But now look who’s riding in on their white horse: those writers you newspaper types wouldn’t give jobs to before because they tried to make their articles all “literary.” Take that, 5 W’s.
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