This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...morePosts Tagged: the Point
This Week in Essays
Noriko Nakada writes with mesmerizing beauty on outrunning her darkness for Catapult. In the latest TORCH installment at The Rumpus, Nadia Owusu traces the inherited trauma in her family’s history.
...moreThis Week in Essays
Here at The Rumpus, this essay by Liz Latty on challenging the fairy tale myth of adoption is receiving a tremendous response from readers. Malloy Owen has written a mind-opening essay for The Point providing a valuable perspective that challenges liberals to reexamine liberalism. Many essays on the election results have expressed complete shock. Maurice Carlos Ruffin […]
...moreA Terrible Question with No Satisfactory Answer
For better or worse, poetry is now the only thing he likes to do. Even with the crying and the hopeless odds. Over at The Point, O.T. Marod writes about the crippling existential despair inherent in the question, “How should a poet make money?”—and a certain poet’s journey in a 2002 Toyota Camry inching along […]
...morePersonal Advice
Writing for The Point, Megan Marz explores the new “essayistic style” of advice columns and advice/fiction/memoir hybrids from writers such as Cary Tennis, Cheryl Strayed, Kristen Dombek, Heather Havrilesky, and Sheila Heti. Are these writers pioneering a “new literary genre”?
...moreWhat Was Once Breathing
Iraqis are generalized as victims, refugees, or, in the worst case, corpses. Betty Rosen, writing for The Point, dives into Iraqi fiction and its relationship with corpses as a way of practicing radical empathy in troubling times, with Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer, Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition, and Ahmad Saadawi’s untranslated Frankenstein in Baghdad.
...moreIntellectual Sadism
Lisa Ruddick, at The Point, gives a state of the union address on critical theory, arguing that current trends are leading us down a dangerous, anti-empathetic, anti-individualistic road towards “cool criticism”: Academic cool is a cast of mind that disdains interpersonal kindness, I-thou connection, and the line separating the self from the outer world and the […]
...more“Porn as a Way of Life”
John Lingan wrote an essay, “Salvation for Civilians: Porn as a Way of Life,” for The Point. He discusses the contemporary debate surrounding porn—which should not be confused with the “keeping sex sacrosanct.” Instead there’s a focus on the internet as the medium through which porn makes its way to viewers and critiquing the “greater […]
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