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A life is divided into three parts: the time before you’re able to work, the time after you’re able to work, and the monstrous bulk of time between. After obedience to the law and some basic moral code, work is one of the great demands placed upon the able. It’s inherently traumatic, a sacrifice of…
Literary Enemies: Gabriel García Márquez vs. Alejandro Zambra Disclaimer: García Márquez has no enemies but the F.B.I. A few weeks ago I went to a panel at the National Book Festival that featured Alejandro Zambra, a Chilean writer I like a lot.[1] (Yes, I started reading him because of the James Wood piece about him…
Yuval Noah Harari argues in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind that much of humankind’s success as a species is owed to its ability to create fictions. Harari focuses primarily on large-scale, societal fictions, say the nation or the corporation. In “Away” (Green Mountains Review), Karin Lin-Greenberg explores our smaller, more personal fictions,…
Complicated bad guys are nothing new. There’s something delicious about complex entertainment; we’re able to envision ourselves in the shoes of the antihero and exact revenge or serve righteous justice, but we’re also able to vicariously live through their actions that lie outside the boundaries of acceptable behavior. When it comes to our villains, we…
Don’t do drugs, kids; read books instead. More often than not, they inspire the same chemical rush with less brain trauma. Herein is a list of ten books with intoxicating, stimulatory, or hallucinatory qualities for the literarily psychotropically-inclined. Though no doubt many deserving books would be right at home on this list, these are just…
Taking up the mantel of memory and elegy is no easy task, but Janice Lee’s new book Reconsolidation: Or, it’s the ghosts who will answer you embraces the ghosts. The text is not so much a reflection on writing, loss, memory, and death, but a twisted projection of those topics. The medium is under as…
What constitutes the difference between delusion and imagination? Where does one end and the other begin, or are they related at all? Colette Inez explores these intersections in her story “Stamp Fever” (The Georgia Review), from the perspective of a young boy struggling to overcome family difficulties. Our introduction to the young protagonist comes when he…
I have a new teaching job this fall, and so I’ve been thinking even more than usual about classrooms, and teachers, and the hold they have on our imaginations. It’s strange to realize, right before I walk into a classroom to teach, how clearly I can remember most of my own teachers’ faces, even many…
In 1922, writer and spiritualism convert Upton Sinclair wrote, “You may go to Lily Dale … and in row after row of tents, you may hear and even see, every kind of spirit you ever dreamed of, ringing bells and shaking tambourines and dancing jigs. And you may see poor farmer’s wives, with tears…
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