Dissecting Suspense in Rebecca
A master of suspense, Daphne du Maurier’s highest skill lies in finding the latent dread in mundane domestic moments.
Critical Essays
Maria Popova’s Figurations of Inner Life
It almost does not matter what someone does or what happens to them. Rather, what matters is what someone thinks they have experienced. As Popova suggests, the true changes in our lives are cognitive as much as they are biographical—or, rather, if they are biographically significant, it is only because they are cognitively so.
The Historical Imperatives of Swing At Your Own Risk
Deeply rooted in Black feminist discourse, Metta Sáma’s second full-length book of poetry is part of a line of historical poetics—part documentary, part interpretative—that refuses to distinguish between the horrors of the past and their ongoing inflections in the present.
The Danger and Loneliness of Passing
Brit Bennett’s recently published novel and Nella Larsen’s classic reveal the danger—and loneliness—of a black woman passing for white in the early 1900s and the 1990s. Passing affords the freedoms and opportunities for reinvention that whiteness allows for, but this comes at a terrible cost.
Oliver Sacks’ Whole-Person Approach
When telling stories of his patients, Oliver Sacks is clinical while also remaining deeply compassionate in his approach. His dual perspective allows him to see both patient and person, and treatment is never the end of the story.
Writing a Home for All My Ghosts
A home doesn’t feel like a home when there are structures built to immortalize those who dehumanized entire populaces. But it feels a little more like home when we’re marching, when we fill spaces with our bodies, our friends, our loves, our strangers, shouting out the names of the disappeared.
The Musicality of Memory in The Hakawati
Rabih Alamaddine’s 2008 novel unleashes music and sound to interrogate the deeply profound and sublime in the seemingly mundane and ordinary.
Lexicon Land
Florida is in a constant state of post-apocalypse. Authors are not immune to this speculative affliction, and when they set their fantasies in Florida, the reinvention of language abounds.
Emma Cline’s Fairy Tale Gone Wrong
To Cline’s Evie, a young girl whose parents are too preoccupied with their respective post-divorce transformations to truly see her and support her, leaving the mild, mind-numbing safety of her small-town and stepping onto a cult leader’s ranch is like stepping into a fairy tale world.