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On the Refreshing Awfulness of Elaine Dundy’s Protagonist in The Old Man and Me

On the Refreshing Awfulness of Elaine Dundy’s Protagonist in The Old Man and Me

Having grown up feeling starved for complex female antiheroes in fiction, women I could actually fully relate to without having to overhaul my personality, morality, or entire appearance, the recent influx of interesting, complex female characters in popular culture has been revelatory.

Neil Gaiman’s “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories” Shouldn’t Work

Neil Gaiman’s “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories” Shouldn’t Work

Neil Gaiman’s “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories” is a story that should not work. Gaiman states almost as much in the introduction to the collection, Smoke and Mirrors, that houses the story. It’s a story that meanders with almost no sense of plot. Yet, it works.

Song for My Foe

Song for My Foe

Hayes and Moss offer us a very different kind of engagement with literary forebears; their responses perhaps recognize how those forebears have unequivocally shaped contemporary poetry, but they also identify the canon as an imperfect, exclusionary artifice and insist that there is not a single literary tradition.