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On Thursday, May 4, 1950, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is published. The twenty-six stories in the collection weave a narrative of nostalgia and doom that spreads across the rust-red Martian landscape, where cringing anxiety mixes with slack-jawed wonder.
When we go to inspect female-presenting writers, the canon is too familiar: Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen. There’s no purpose in arguing this. What’s more interesting is uncovering forgotten women writers—women who wrote poetry with T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in life, or produced movies with Alfred Hitchcock. It was Patricia Highsmith that Hitchcock,…
It’s fairly common to read about fictional protagonists whose past traumas serve as obstacles in their present lives. But often those traumas are at the hands of another, whether a parent, lover, spouse, a childhood bully, or even a childhood friend. In “Nola” (Monkeybicycle), Jacqueline Doyle explores a protagonist haunted not by what happened…
One of John Updike’s early and most anthologized stories, “A & P,” from Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, is a modern retelling of James Joyce’s “Araby” from The Dubliners.
It is this sort of layered questioning early in the novel where The Measure of Darkness is at its strongest and most emotionally resonant—who are you if the very skill that has been your reason for existence has been taken from you? And on a secondary level, what it is like to rationally know that your own perceptions and the basis for your own experience can no longer be trusted—to be told of, but to not actually experience the ways in which your perception is flawed?
I remember my first years in America from the early 1990s. I was a graduate student of journalism at the University of South Carolina, in Columbia, S.C., where I was still finding my feet in the U.S., full of wonder and curiosity—and apprehension. One semester at the university, after I enrolled for a course in…
Christos Ikonomou is the author of three short story collections, including Something Will Happen, You’ll See (Archipelago Books, trans. Karen Emmerich, 2016), for which he won the National Short Story Prize. Something Will Happen, You’ll See, a devastating and sparingly written collection of stories about the Greek crisis in working class neighborhoods in Athens, is…
Dear Nikki: Thank you for sharing your new short story, “Oops I don’t have a title haha,” with the class. I look forward to discussing it in workshop. I read this story as an exploration of the narrator’s excitement and disappointments during a rock-climbing trip with a group of friends, and as a meditation on…
John Gallaher’s book-length poem In A Landscape has the feel of a long, wide-ranging conversation with an old friend. It’s like one of those cross-country car ride conversations when there’s time to talk about anything and everything: the tiny details of day-to-day living and the meaning-of-life questions that keep us up at night. His other…
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