Female Prisoners in Emily Brontë’s Gondal Poems
Emily Brontë’s attraction to images and metaphors of imprisonment are fueled by historical precedent and romantic inclination, especially by way of Mary, Queen of Scots.
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Don Quixote or the Dangers of Reading Badly
Again and again the story of Don Quixote shows that idealism untethered from reality leads to nothing but real harm, and I find in it a cautionary tale for our age, in which misinformation and conspiracy theories proliferate.
Last Night in Nuuk by Niviaq Korneliussen
Niviaq Korneliussen’s novel is short, only around two hundred pages, but it moves like a bullet: powerful, emotionally dense, and over much more quickly than I wanted it to be.
A Return to Main Street
Sinclair Lewis’s novel offers no solutions to current social ills, nor does fiction serve such ends well. Fiction may, on the other hand, meditate on the romantic and the realistic to reveal insight into individual minds seeking out the world to find the best way to live in it.
The Colonizers
Claire Messud’s novel intimately considers the legacy and trauma of the pieds-noirs through the story of a family living in Marseilles, France in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
Mackintosh’s characters offer a representation of how young women deal with grief once a familial structure is undone, in the way of filling empty spaces that begin to present themselves.
Revisiting Alice Munro’s “Material”
Munro raises questions about the relationship between two things that often coincide in writers: the first is a certain amount of self-indulgence and self-mythologizing; the second is the difficult work of putting aside the ego and observing the world.
Unmooring
Those who write about their mental illnesses—Jane Kenyon, Susanna Kaysen, Andrew Solomon, Kay Redfield Jamison, and Elizabeth Wurtzel to name a very small few—often struggle to reconcile their character with the disease that riddles them.
Children of Exile
Between December 1960 and October 1962, around fourteen-thousand unaccompanied children arrived in Miami from Cuba as part of Operation Pedro Pan; my father, migrated here on June 29, 1961.