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Heraclitus, the “Weeping Philosopher,” described Sybil as “[a] frenzied mouth [that] utter[s] things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the god.” Erica Dawson’s remarkable new book describes our tumultuous present with all the tenacity of Sybil.
The house is often used as a symbol of security in literature, and a ruined home can speak to what a given writer thinks we need protection from. Both the threats to security, and the emotional impact of a literary ruin shift with the writer and her cultural moment.
Certain writers—often those writers who are said to “transcend their genre”—combine action-filled plots with complex character development. How do they stop the action in, say, a zombie apocalypse, so that the characters can become intimate and so the reader can grow to care about their inner lives?
Mark Doten’s novel opens with the fictional Trump making a bad decision. All over the world, the internet has gone down. When it comes back up, for reasons no one quite understands, he uses the nuclear codes.
Books by Kevin Brockmeier—focusing on the horror of surviving seventh grade—and Buddhist psychotherapist Mark Epstein dissect the trauma of everyday life.
Poetry’s bread and butter is the interior; it goes where movies want to go, but can’t, by the nature of the form. So when a poem wants to respond to a film, how does it make use of this tension, and alchemize it into art?
I found within Perez’s poetry a dexterous remixing of the settler colonial archive, a deeply lyrical autobiographical sensibility, and a sustained commitment to the decolonization of literature, history, his native Guam, and other mappings.
Suarez opens his 2018 short story collection with a dive into the bizarre nature of Cuba: “Stealing the giraffe wasn’t the problem. Transporting it from the city to the countryside-even at two a.m. on a Wednesday night with a few bribed cops clearing the path-that was another story.”
Ross Gay’s new essay collection restores pleasure as a site of serious thought and, even more, as a mode in inquiry in itself, while his wholesome (but never saccharine) voice convinces us that a mode of inquiry, a way of thinking, too, can be pleasure itself.
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