Portraits of Motherhood and Grief
Stories by Megan Mayhew Bergman, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, and Lorrie Moore portray mothers transformed by grief, their ideas of motherhood complicated by the crises that befall them.
Author: Sarah Appleton Pine
Making Space
Moving exposes the true quantity of our stuff: there’s too much. And what story do these objects, and the way in which they inhabit space, tell? Our possessions tell the stories of our changing bodies, our relationships, our jobs, the pandemic, the hobbies we’ve given up on, our privilege.
Incomprehensible and Ungraspable
“When I was a teacher, death always lingered in the back of my mind.”
The Artful Arrangement of 300 Arguments, Heating & Cooling, and The Crying Book
Sarah Manguso, Beth Ann Fennelly, and Heather Christle show that what may at first look like fragments are instead distillations of memories, emotions, and experience—made stronger by their brevity and turned into something whole through their painstaking arrangement.
“Grief with animals isn’t the same, and we can learn something from that”: An Interview with Annie Hartnett
By combining the voices of the dead with the experiences of the living, Annie Hartnett builds a sense of community. Her characters are not navigating hardships in isolation but with the support of family and friends, animals and the dead.
“Girlhood is a much darker, more complex—more amazing—experience than what that association suggests”: An Interview with Melissa Febos
The essays of Febos’s new essay collection read less like a coming-of-age story than they do like a manifesto of all the ways girlhood takes a toll on a girl’s life, as well as of the cultural experience of being a woman.
Memory and Transformation in Aurelia, Aurélia
Kathryn Davis’s new memoir explores memory as something formative—something that begins as a static point then transitions into something alive, yielding something new, remembering becoming an experience in its own right.
Morphine’s Resonant Portrayal of Addiction
If one were to substitute “opioid” for “morphine,” Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1926 novella feels like it could have been written yesterday. Reading it is thus nearly unbearable: it asks us to look at how little perception and treatment of substance use disorder has changed over the course of a hundred years.
Mundanity Among Tragedy in How High We Go in the Dark
Published two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, Sequoia Nagamatsu’s debut novel is in some ways comforting, and in others a brutal reflection of our current moment. Through the course of the tragedies and mundanities explored within, every facet of every person’s life is altered; Nagamatsu explores how people handle a changing world.