metaphor
-
My Voice for Their Drugs
Anxiety disorients me from inside. My heart moves so erratically I’m afraid it will give out, my breath so staggered I have to remind myself to take in air.
-
This Week in Short Fiction
Autumn is the season of change and, some say, death, as the leaves turn, the air cools, and the nights lengthen. Likewise, Halloween is not just a holiday for costumes and candy but also, at its untouched roots, a day…
-
A Story to Use and Reuse
At Necessary Fiction, Anna Rowser’s story “Breaking Down” effectively uses the subject of recycling as a metaphor to subtly explore what the narrator wants, needs, uses, reuses, and casts off both physically and emotionally. It’s fiction that makes you rethink…
-
This Week in Short Fiction
This week at Recommended Reading, PEN America offers an excerpt from Brazilian author Noemi Jaffe’s novel Írisz: as orquídeas, which is remarkable for many reasons, one of them being that this is so far the only opportunity to read part of…
-
The Rumpus Interview with Miroslav Penkov
Miroslav Penkov discusses his debut novel, Stork Mountain, Balkan history, and the difficulties and rewards of being a bilingual writer.
-
This Week in Short Fiction
The grief story: it’s sympathetic, moving, and even cathartic when done well. It’s also a trap for clichés, overwrought metaphors, sticky sentimentality, and hyperbole. Add that to the ubiquity of the grief story, and you get a subject that can…
-
Living with the Cloud
How did we come to place our faith in a symbol that is so ephemeral—all vapor and crystal? The New Yorker explores how the metaphor of “the cloud” is shaping how we experience the Internet.
-
The Saturday Rumpus Review: Güeros
It’s a literal confrontation of his metaphorical fear, a visual take on Rilke’s words: to view Güeros is to see a “thing poem” on the screen, to witness something like “The Panther” materialize.
-
This Week in Short Fiction
There are countless metaphors for love: a rose, a flame, a garden, a loaded gun, a battlefield. We’ve heard them all—or so we thought. This week at Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Joyland editor Lisa Locascio recommended Amelia Gray’s story, “The…
-
How to Chart a Course Through the Metaphors in Your Mind
Why do we refer to our minds in terms of seas and cartography, anyway? Find out by consulting your sextant and the first online metaphor map. The chart boasts over 14,000 metaphorical connections, sourced from 4,000,000 lexical data points by…
-
Crafting a Metaphor
One thing you learn very quickly as a metaphor designer is that your language and your culture’s resources aren’t infinite. Nor are they as versatile as you might hope. The richness of the semantic resources that a designer can muster…
-
I Am the Modern Man
A new website called Poetry for Robots seeks to find out whether robots can learn human poetic language. It was inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s theory that despite humanity’s near-infinite capacity for creating distinct metaphors, we still use the same…