The Grounding Power of the Past
The gravitational pull of the physical is a placeholder for the mental, emotional, and spiritual work that Sarah M. Broom’s 2019 book, and the stories within, is doing.
Critical Essays
James Alan McPherson’s Masterpieces
I am inevitably an outsider to the worlds McPherson wrote about and can only understand them as such, but for me his writing cut across race, culture, age, and geography to reach the most ignorant of audiences, and to show me what a real “masterpiece” looked like.
The Fancy and Imagination of Herman Melville
The frolicking of sailors aboard a ship’s deck reminds Herman Melville of young horses, which might lead him to the “gambols” of whales. In associations such as these, Melville shows us the incongruities and false gilding we add to life in order to make it more palatable, less terrifying.
The Ethics of Delight
We could try to protect ourselves at this time from dread, despair, and our own fury; or, like Ross Gay, we could seek delight, and find through it a doorway into engagement in the world, painful as it might be.
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s 115-Year-Old Feminist Utopia
In her satirical critique of the patriarchy in which she imagines a new, feminist society, Hossain’s 1905 short story “Sultana’s Dream” alludes to some of the most pressing contemporary global crises—epidemic disease, human displacement, overdependence on non-renewable energy, militarization of local police forces and the carceral mindset.
Meeting and Making Heroes
Jenn Shapland’s lyrical debut demonstrates how she has been made by, and has remade, her hero Carson McCullers—and how this relationship between writer and subject is at the heart of every biography, and every memoir.
Compact Spaces and Relationships in Howards End and On Beauty
E.M. Forster’s novel is deeply concerned with compactly contained relationships, as well as the ideas and spaces that forge these connections. Zadie Smith’s modern-day retelling explores similarly contained personal relationships with a significant update: the book is set on a college campus.
Reading The Book of Men
Nano Shabtai’s 2015 book feels especially personal to me. For the past three years, I’ve been working on a memoir about how the world of relationships is experienced through the eyes of a woman who is often troubled by sex but has been instructed her entire life to prioritize romantic love above all else.
The Language of Domestic Violence
Rachel Louise Snyder’s 2019 book demonstrates how even imperfect language can be powerful and why word choice is especially important when speaking about this complicated crime.