Science Fiction Can Change the World: Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
With Borne VanderMeer presents a parable about modern life, in these shaky days of roughshod industrialism, civilizational collapse, and looming planetary catastrophe.
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The Otherworldly Intrigue of Daisy Johnson’s Fen
As a reader, the world of Fen won’t leave you. That is Johnson’s power as a writer—she creates a dark, self-aware world that feels heavy and gray and covered in mist.
Inequality Is Everyone’s Problem: The Broken Ladder by Keith Payne
Inequality, in Payne’s eyes, is massively detrimental to everyone in unequal societies, and everyone needs to know it.
The Whimsy and Discipline of Anne Garréta’s Not One Day
If people cannot be captured, if “there are only erasures,” then might as well seek them in elisions, where their potential remains.
A Full-Throated Cry from a Clarion: Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan
We seem to be floating in a weird soup of truthiness and alternative facts. Perhaps the state of American life explains the explosive power of The Book of Joan, or perhaps it’s the other way around; perhaps, at last, American life is ready for Lidia Yuknavitch.
Jessa Crispin Can’t Do It Alone in Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto
Crispin’s writing strikes a tone that at times parallels neoconservative—even alt-right—pundits: commentary peppered with political injunctions, not criticism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Celebrating Failures in Nell Stevens’s Bleaker House
Who has time for Writer Problems in the midst of all these PROBLEMS?