Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer re-situates history. 3 million Vietnamese died, and 58,000 American soldiers. A generation later, Nguyen has given this history an authentic voice—a voice that has been brushed aside, hidden from discourse, from textbooks, from individuals whose identities contain it.
Thanks mostly to the incredible work of the local bookstore chain Politics and Prose, I’ve seen some of my favorite authors and chatted, oh so briefly, with them after collecting their signatures. For someone who loves listening to authors talk, my cup runneth over.
Set in the fictional, working-class town of Victory, North Carolina in the armpit of the 1970s, Maureen Brady’s 1982 novel, Folly, is an expansive love story that begins when a diverse group of women decide to walk off their garment factory jobs.
What is the meaning of consent within an oppressive culture? This question lies at the heart of Lilith’s Brood, Octavia Butler’s sci-fi trilogy which presents an extended allegory for colonialism that is inextricably tied to rape and other types of nonconsensual sex.
Dracula is cloaked in dark. This is fundamental to his myth. He haunts his grounds at night, and stalks the holds of a ship; never clearly seen, or seen the same way twice, he is misinterpreted. Sunlight weakens him.
How does the act of “scrolling” through social media platforms affect our experience of time and narrative structures? What does it mean for how we participate in our cultures and engage with our own identities?
Walking in wilderness is sometimes marketed as a clarifying experience—walk to clear your head, or push your limits, or find peace. I’ve always found it to be an exercise in entertaining contradictory thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations.
In “The Interior Castle,” Jean Stafford utilizes imaginary settings to display the importance of self-ownership and authority. By placing significance on the concrete and the ephemeral, writing about instances of control, and by using pain as a ballast for maintaining boundaries between the real and the imagined, Stafford actualizes setting as a marker for autonomy.
In Percival Everett’s story “A High Lake,” magic bubbles to the surface in thrilling ways.
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