By providing characterizations that transcend the limits of traditional intimacy Groff creates a spectrum of dysfunction. Without boundaries, love becomes poisonous. Its removal is painful.
The first time I read Gina Berriault’s story “The Infinite Passion of Expectation,” I experienced it as an inundation. The plot is strange but simple: a young waitress goes on frequent walks with an eccentric, aging psychologist, who eventually asks her to marry him—she’s unsure. The psychologist lives an unconventional life; he shares his house…
What does it mean to be culturally legible? And what does cultural legibility mean with regard to writing about or from within one’s own culture?
Beginning with her childhood in Wisconsin and threading through her years in Chicago, Iowa, Kentucky, and numerous cities abroad, Kristen Radtke’s 2017 graphic memoir Imagine Wanting Only This chronicles her enduring obsession with ruins and the significance people find in them. Instigated by the premature death of her uncle, Radtke contrasts these “scooped-out places,” abandoned…
In Aldo Leopold’s Game Management, published in 1933, he pointed out the overlapping zones between biomes and coined the term “edge effect.” All my life I had lived in those two ecosystems: that of the family I was adopted into, and that of my family of origin.
The ethics of reviewing poetry have recently reemerged as a hot-button issue in the literary community. Many writers have discussed the efficacy and aims of the “negative” review—how and if it impacts poetry and its readership in general.
In David Grossman’s award-winning novel A Horse Walks into a Bar, the narrator, a retired judge, describes one night in the life of the protagonist, Dovaleh, a stand-up comedian in his late fifties and his lost childhood friend.
In Laurie Colwin’s short story “The Lone Pilgrim,” the unnamed narrator describes her longing for the domestic lives of others: “Oh, domesticity! The wonder of dinner plates and cream pitchers…We domestic sensualists live in a state of longing, no matter how comfortable your own places are.” What the narrator desires more than the jelly molds…
Translated from German into English in 2015, Austrian author Marianne Fritz’s The Weight of Things presents domesticity and motherhood as intolerable, even unbearable, in the aftermath of the Second World War.
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