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Elizabeth Miki Brina traces the stories of her mother and father and delves into the relationships between their homes to examine her inheritances and figure out how they’ve manifested within her.
To take the long view of history is to find company with our ancestors. In Véronique Tadjo’s 2017 novel, available today in English, it is “Baobab, the first tree, the everlasting tree, the totem tree” that sees humanity from this perspective.
John Millington Synge’s 1907 play is now a classic, examining, among other elements, the definition of a hero and the role of the community in that definition. Over a hundred years later, two contemporary novels, both set following the 2008 financial crisis, echo it in numerous ways.
Olaudah Equiano’s genre-defining slave narrative is at once an adventure novel, bildungsroman, and a conversion story. Each of these forms contributes to his argument for the abolishment of slavery, and his creation of this literary framework is the origin to which today’s anti-racism writing can be traced.
After almost fifty years of his poetry, Muldoon has prepared his readers for a journey not through our own predictable circles—these syntactical maps rule out one’s own choice between right or left—but to arrive somewhere comfortably unexpected.
While many have praised the book’s feminist themes, none have noticed that the Hulu adaptation highlights Atwood’s special warning intended for women writers, historians, artists, and documentarians. In a patriarchal society turned radical and violent, a woman’s voice will be stifled by taking away the written word.
Since reading Natalia Ginzburg’s 1963 novel last year, I have wanted to identify and investigate my own family lexicon, the basis of our unity in the pressure of our semi-quarantine in a two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment with no yard and not much of a view.
Melissa Faliveno’s 2020 essay collection’s genius, and tenderness, comes from a deep understanding of the language of home: the haunting, often unacknowledged pull place has on us, and how leaning towards and pushing against this pull shapes our identities.
London’s book is impressive not just for its correctly intuited factual predictions, but also for those related to the way the inequities of his world would only grow exponentially as its population did, and the way those inequities would define the events that took place during and after the plague.
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