Chapbook Round-Up: Titles from Cincinnati’s Porkbelly Press
Porkbelly Press is a Cincinnati-based press that puts out chapbooks and micro-chapbooks as well as a literary magazines and anthologies.
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Not Like One of the Family: Novels of Dignity and Domestic Labor
The myth of Rosie the Riveter is as well-known as her bandana-clad hair and stoic flexing. As a way to supplement male industrial labor resources depleted by World War II, Rosie represented the potential for women economically left behind since the Great Depression to gain financial power over their lives.
Review: I KNOW YOUR KIND by William Brewer
With scars across its pages, I Know Your Kind conveys the pervasive shadow the opioid epidemic casts across Oceana—and, by extension, towns like Oceana—in a way that statistics, figures, and journalism cannot.
The Words of Black Activists
Black people have been fed so much toothless rhetoric regarding how we are supposed to deal with the brutal realities of racism that it now starts to ring both disingenuous and hollow.
The Best Short Story I Read This Month: “Take Your Child To Work Report” by Maya Beck
By formatting her short story “Take Your Child To Work Day Report” like an actual report, Maya Beck examines power dynamics in the classroom and society as a whole.
Nora Ephron and the Lost Art of Magazine Writing
It’s my opinion that Nora Ephron never should have left journalism. Sure there was a lot more money to be made writing and directing major motion pictures like When Harry Met Sally or Sleepless in Seattle, but Ephron had a gift for magazine writing.
Sudden, Gradual Change
I had been trying to get my 4-year-old daughter to put her face in the water at the pool for two years before she just suddenly did it one day—one night, really, near the end of this summer, the light dying, the rest of us standing poolside with our shoes on and our bags packed telling her come on, get out, time to go home.
Novels Where the Digressions Are Half the Point
Of all the reasons to read a novel, plot tends to be the most compelling. Yet atmosphere, ideas, humor, the construction of a well-turned-out sentence–all these are also incentives to keep turning pages.
What is a Foreigner?
There are few more cutting words in a language you don’t speak fluently than the word foreigner. In Greek the word, xenos, bites into your skin, pins you down into the character of the other, even though at its simplest form it means to not be of the place.