Edward P. Jones does not represent the Washington D.C. of the mainstream—no national monuments perforating his setting, no overt commentary on policy, no presidential-brand elitism lacing his words. Instead, he simply writes the life of the local everyman and pushes anything beyond that into the background, making excess as distant and flat as a souvenir postcard.
“The Aleph” by Jorge Luis Borges concerns, along with mirrors and the infinite: the demolition of a house, literary prizes, fragile egos, café lighting, the death of Beatriz Viterbo, and a few terrible stanzas by Carlos Argentino Daneri, a pompous and longwinded academic.
There’s something wonderful in the thought of the subconscious of James Joyce meeting with that of Joyce Carol Oates to create her story “The Dead,” a response to his story of the same name.
Language retains the rhetorical barrier between the wild and the civilized, the false dichotomy upon which humans have built cities and established nations. It’s within this partition that poetic genres like the Romantic lyric and the pastoral took root, ensconcing the obfuscations that Tommy Pico rails against.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, published March 31, 1969, follows anti-hero Billy Pilgrim, inspired by Edward Crone Jr., as he survives the Battle of the Bulge, German internment, and the Dresden firebombing, finally settling into a comfortable life as an optometrist in upstate New York.
Last year Amitav Ghosh asked: where are the novels of climate change? Arguing that a limited sense of reality prevents us from accepting the truly uncanny threat that is climate change, Ghosh urges writers to be imaginatively bold and dynamic, and calls for a revival of Romanticism.
The Black Maria, Aracelis Girmay’s intricate epic of black survival, enraptures the reader in a gaze that looks simultaneously backward and forward, toward past and future that are impossible to see yet crucial to imagine.
The sickly and nightmare-plagued Lovecraft shows an inclination toward the sciences as a child, but his passion for literature emerges in his early adulthood. At thirty-seven, the master of cosmic horror publishes his genre-defining story “The Call of Cthulhu” in the February 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales.
When Beyoncé dropped her masterpiece Lemonade last year, the world was abuzz. In her groundbreaking visual album, images of black femaleness manifest as not only sexually pleasing to imagine, but empowering to behold.
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