How Do We Decide What to Read?
There are too many beloved books and not enough prizes, and somehow they get lost underneath all the news about the really important books that I should be reading.
Critical Essays
Splintered Selves and Sexual Abuse in Dorothy Nelson’s In Night’s City
Set in 1970s Ireland, Dorothy Nelson’s In Night’s City is an obscure, deceptively slim book. Unofficial predecessor to Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, the novel charts Sara’s attempts to assimilate sexual abuse, suffering, and shame.
A Small-Town Coming Out in an Online World
The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves starts, like many books set in a small town, with a homecoming.
Sculpting Flesh From Text in My Body is a Book of Rules
How to control the body is a constant theme in Washuta’s work.
Scansion and Contemporary Poetry
How might the practice of scansion as a tool toward understanding and crafting poetry become more equitable and expansive so as to allow for poets’ and readers’ different fundamental orientations toward language?
Thomas Hardy’s Rule-Breaking Heroines
Hardy humanizes his heroines’ ambitions, the intensity of their feelings, their fancies and passions. In both Bathsheba Everdene and Tess Durbeyfield, Hardy writes intelligent women who work hard and write their own rulebooks.
When Scientists Study Novels
The point is to understand that what constitutes “literary” versus “genre” fiction—an age-old topic of study and debate within literary circles—is fundamental, not ancillary, to scientific findings on the effects of reading novels.
Pictures of You: Understanding Life Through Memoirs
The need to figure out why we are who we are is what drew me to Elissa Altman’s memoir Treyf, a bittersweet and touching memoir of the author’s growing up years in 1970s New York City and Queens.
Expecting the Fish of Anguish: For the Love of the Non Sequitur
Perhaps in times like these, when the work of making sense of the world around us gets harder, we need poetry that points toward that difficulty—and that makes that work worthwhile.