Revisiting, Revising, Reimagining Home in How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
Revisiting his 2013 essay collection has strengthened Kiese Makeba Laymon’s voice and allowed him to truly build a home in the space he keeps.
Critical Essays
The Reimagined Tales of Where the Wild Ladies Are
The stories in Matsuda Aoko’s 2016 collection encourage us to change how we understand stories—whether that be the folktales we tell children or the larger national myths we hold on to as adults—and to see where we can break away from received narratives into new futures.
Samanta Schweblin’s Experiments in Agency
Schweblin’s voyeuristic robots and continuously shifting perspective guides us through an extended meditation on personal agency that is both bleeding edge and timeless: when do we defend and when do we willfully forfeit our autonomy? How is it taken from us and how do we erase it from others?
Herman Melville and the Desolation of Solitude
I’d never felt the urgency to see Arrowhead, Melville’s historic home in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, but suddenly robbed of my own social life, it was time for me to go and see why a writer, like Melville, would actually ask for such isolation.
Complicating the Domestic
In this moment, it’s difficult to view any domestic arrangement without its undercurrent of uncertainty or instability. Two poems written in a fairy-tale register—Jane Hirshfield’s “Amor Fati” and Kiki Petrosino’s “Nursery”—capture this sense of pervasive menace, and complicate the idea of home as the ultimate refuge from a threatening outside world.
Good Morning, Midnight and the Failure of Our Daily “Programs”
Reading Jean Rhys’s 1939 novel, I soon landed on the lazy word unlikeable to describe its protagonist. The moment the word arose in my mind, I was suspicious, but I found Sasha’s inability to make a place for herself in the world, even on the margins, exasperating.
Reading, the Collective, and the Formation of the Self
Yiyun Li transcends the individual through the way she focuses so singularly on the I, moments of aloneness, and solitary memories, rather than on feelings she has from shared memories. Yu Hua, too, transcends the individual, though he does so by offering his experience as a way of representing collective experience.
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Lost Edens
Erpenbeck’s 2008 novel, centered on the history of a small parcel of land on the edge of the German lake known as the Märkisches Meer, is a sophisticated retelling of the Creation and Fall stories from the biblical book of Genesis.
The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark
Best known for being a novelist, Muriel Spark was also a writer of short stories, many of which were ghostly. In her ghost stories, more often than not, Spark tests the old tropes by giving them a firm twist.