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Chapbooks that combine the work of a writer with that of a visual artist are rarer than, perhaps, they should be. There’s something special about flipping open a chapbook to find art within its pages as well.
What is the meaning of consent within an oppressive culture? This question lies at the heart of Lilith’s Brood, Octavia Butler’s sci-fi trilogy which presents an extended allegory for colonialism that is inextricably tied to rape and other types of nonconsensual sex.
Imagine an anthology of the literature of walking, with examples ranging from the Middle Ages to the present. Now imagine a book containing only commentaries on these ruminations on walking, without the accompaniment of the texts that inspired them.
SZA’s debut studio album, Ctrl, impresses fans with her lyrical honesty. In a lengthy and confessional letter to Drew Barrymore, SZA wrote how Drew’s movies Poison Ivy and Never Been Kissed shaped her and eased her anxiety “about being awkward and having crooked teeth.”
Dracula is cloaked in dark. This is fundamental to his myth. He haunts his grounds at night, and stalks the holds of a ship; never clearly seen, or seen the same way twice, he is misinterpreted. Sunlight weakens him.
How does the act of “scrolling” through social media platforms affect our experience of time and narrative structures? What does it mean for how we participate in our cultures and engage with our own identities?
On September 28, 1972, Bambara publishes her first collection of short stories, Gorilla, My Love, chronicling the lives and perspectives of African American characters in both urban and rural settings. A New York Times reviewer praises the stories in the debut collection as “tough, violent, funny, and frantically relevant.”
Walking in wilderness is sometimes marketed as a clarifying experience—walk to clear your head, or push your limits, or find peace. I’ve always found it to be an exercise in entertaining contradictory thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations.
In “The Interior Castle,” Jean Stafford utilizes imaginary settings to display the importance of self-ownership and authority. By placing significance on the concrete and the ephemeral, writing about instances of control, and by using pain as a ballast for maintaining boundaries between the real and the imagined, Stafford actualizes setting as a marker for autonomy.
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