Stories Strangely Told: Big Want
The way we most often talk about it desire is an aspect of character. Which is all fine, really, until we slam into those desires so bullish in their insistency that no longer can we play like we own them.
Blog
So Your Character Wants to Be a Historian
There’s no easy way to actually quantify this, but it feels like more and more characters I see in books are historians of some kind – regardless of their status, amateur or professional, these are characters who do sleuthing work about the past, consciously or not.
Girls Looking in the Mirror
As a teenager, I suffered long bouts of gazing into the mirror. Time fell away and I went into a kind of deliberate stupor. I thought if I stared long enough, I might forget who I was looking at, and—for a moment—see myself as others saw me.
Must Reads for Fall
The weather is turning, and books—as always—will bring us steadily through to the end of the year. Here are our choices for this fall’s best reads.
Pensando en Puerto Rico
Marigloria Palma renders the spectrality of her island—the willful legal, economic, and social (which is all to say: racist) invisibilities that have intentioned to create humanitarian crisis and impending exodus in the hurricane’s wake. “We’re dying here. We truly are dying here.”
The Death of the Reader
I wanted to begin this piece with a line like: “It’s dead, thank God” but Barthelme beat me to the punch thirty years ago in his essay “Not-Knowing.”
Finding Community in the Apocalypse
Apocalypse narratives so often focus on isolation—a person up against a wasteland or navigating groups of raiding cannibals—but what happens to the communities in these situations and what do the stories made from them show about the ebb and flow of disasters that weigh on any community.
Review: WHY BUDDHISM IS TRUE: THE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF MEDITATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT by Robert Wright
He’s not even arguing that Buddhism is true.
The Best Short Story I Read This Month: “Missing Things” by Edwin Madu
Every word carries with it a connotative meaning, a definition that stretches beyond what can be found in the dictionary. Edwin Madu uses this notion to his advantage in his short story “Missing Things” published by Okey-Panky in July of this year.