The Refugee Narrative as Ghost Story
Migration, especially for refugees, is a violent crossing. In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s story collection The Refugees and Mai Der Vang’s Afterland, the dead, and all else the living abandoned, refuse to be left behind.
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Stealth Animal Rights Novels
As A.A. Milne wrote in Winnie-the-Pooh, “Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That’s the problem.” The simple act of reading about animals challenges the conventional way that humans impose orders on other creatures, without wondering about their lives.
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Perfectly Aligned: Inger Christensen’s Poetry Through Her American Translator Susanna Nied
Though Christensen’s work has been well-loved in Europe since the publications of her first two collections of poetry, in Danish, her poetry did not reach American audiences until alphabet, translated by Susanna Nied and published by New Directions in 2001.
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Virtue and Liberation: The Literary Battle for the Mind of the American Mill Girl
Work, and the psychological impacts of work, are rarely represented in fiction, even though America has a rich literary history of labor narratives, particularly in the case of female writers, dating as far back as the mid-nineteenth century.
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Breaking Under the Weight of Formula in The Vision
In the recent Marvel comic, The Vision, Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta explore the tight rope between narrative exploration and the expectations of continuity in a series about a family of superpowered robots trying to live a different kind of story.
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Four Summer Books That Redefine the Beach Read
Who says a good beach read can’t also be a book that packs some punch? Here are four of this summer’s best.
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“When You Read These Poems, They’re Yours”: An Interview With Leslie Harrison
Leslie Harrison’s poems are meditative and thoughtful, yet fleet-footed, quick to change direction. They show us a mind in motion, questing and questioning, wrestling with complex feelings and ideas.
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The Roving Poets of Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College sprung up in the 1930s, near Asheville, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a short-lived school born in a time of crisis.
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“Adventure of a Skier” and Calvino’s Theory of Lightness
Last week, the New Yorker released the first English translation of Italo Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Skier,” which first appeared in the 1970 short story collection Difficult Loves. How does this “new” story fit into the themes and philosophical musings of the work as a whole?
