This is Normal: Reading Evil in the Everyday
On Twitter, people keep saying this “isn’t normal.” In this story, the villain is an exception to the rule of normalcy. Maybe, I thought, that story is easier to tell than the real one.
Reading
Homesickness for Divided Places and Unknown Lands
When does a home become so hostile that you should consider leaving? Southern writers complicate clearly defined ideas of homesickness. In states where discrimination was legislated, hate crimes not prosecuted, and outsiders viewed with suspicion, nostalgia mixes with escapist impulses, love of landscape with horror at racial violence.
Earing the Clink of Chisels: An Imperfect Love Letter to Reading Literary Magazines
Every time I pause in front of a stack of lit mags at my house, I find myself flipping through one for a morsel. Gimme something good. I find myself re-reading things I’ve already read and feeling surprised by them again and again, as if the magazine keeps the poems new and Ziploc-fresh.
All the Lives I Marched For: Alana Massey’s Second Stories
I learned I am a Winona in a world made for Gwyneths. From the onset, Massey probes how society shapes or punishes women based on how we talk about or dismiss them. She writes with as much empathy about the women we mock as she does the women we admire.
The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: Taking the Temperature of Zora Neale Hurston’s Central Florida
Central Florida, sticky with humidity and restless with sea breeze, inspires the temperature of Hurston’s fiction and, in turn, the temperament of her characters. In her 1926 short story “Sweat,” Hurston chronicles the marriage of Delia, a washerwoman, and her unemployed, abusive husband Sykes.
The Psychopathic Gaze: Murder, Violence, and Misogyny in Natsuo Kirino’s Out
Out is an exhausting but indispensable blood-and-guts novel that constructs real, complex, contradictory, and authentically credible female characters who transgress the social hierarchies of Japanese culture while also defying the sexist and stock stereotypes of women as helpless victims in both slasher and thriller genres.
The Current
Lately I’ve been thinking more than usual, like a lot of us, I suspect, about the two stages I occupy at the same time, in each moment and with every decision: the personal and the political. My own small domestic stage has stretched.
On Being An Impostor: This Girl’s Life
I should have graduated high school in the year 2000. I was young for my year and, as my mother put it, “immature.” Instead of plodding along through public school, I spent tenth grade begging my parents to allow me to apply to The Hill School…
“Why Doctors Make Natural Writers”
Doctors have been writers for as long as they have been doctors. The disciplinary divide between the humanities and sciences is a recent invention. Judging by the quantity and quality of writing by doctors in the past several decades alone, I might also suggest that some of our best philosophers have been physicians.