A Whole Host of Western Woes
True, a marital murder-suicide does take place on the way, but it’s an act of calculated altruism, done for the good of the group. For the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz reviews…
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the new yorker
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The Evolution of Adrienne Rich
Over at the New Yorker, Dan Chiasson marks the publication of Adrienne Rich’s collected works with an examination of the incredible arc of her life and career. And instead of…
The Vulnerability of Outsiders
Carmen Maria Machado reflects on her experience reading Lois Duncan’s novels in her youth, and explains why she continues to return to Duncan’s work to this day: Duncan has sometimes been…
This Week in Short Fiction
This week, Karen Russell of Swamplandia! fame has a new story in The New Yorker that unearths the self-deceptions beneath what we often think is love, and also unearths a…
The Important Queerness of Frog and Toad
At the New Yorker, Colin Stokes lauds the classic Frog and Toad’s “amphibious celebration of same-sex love” and discusses the ways in which it may have been inspired by Arnold Lobel’s…
Imagining the Past
Over at the New Yorker, Lucy Ives writes about how some recent works of fiction challenge conventional definitions of historical fiction by “offer[ing] a past of competing perspectives, of multiple…
To Collide Continually
Our entire body, like it or not, enacts a stunning resurrection of the dead just as we advance toward our own death. We are, as you say, interconnected. For the New…
Unshelf, Flip Open, Drop Out
Hua Hsu peers beneath the surface of Jesse Jarnow’s new book, a comprehensive history of LSD and the countercultural forces it inspired.
The Great American Sermon
After all, the essay, in its American incarnation, is a direct outgrowth of the sermon: argumentative, insistent, not infrequently irritating. Minimalist prose. Maximalist ideas. A long tradition of anti-intellectualism. Adverbs.…
The Moment of Change is the Only Poem
In poetry words can say more than they mean and mean more than they say. Over at the New Yorker, Claudia Rankine writes about the transformations Adrienne Rich underwent in…
Splain And Simple Truth
I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of mansplaining, but just in case you’re not, here are some examples of ways to clarify that you’re not being patronizing. I’d be…
Don’t Quit Your Day Job
But dip into nearly any of Stevens’s poems, to the last, and be braced by a voice like none other, in its knitted playfulness and in its majesty. For most…