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Hua Hsu’s new memoir ends with his decision to go to therapy to attend to his irrational guilt over his friend’s death. It helps him come to the realization that what he wanted to write was not a eulogy but a “true account of the deceased,” one filled with joy.
Moving exposes the true quantity of our stuff: there’s too much. And what story do these objects, and the way in which they inhabit space, tell? Our possessions tell the stories of our changing bodies, our relationships, our jobs, the pandemic, the hobbies we’ve given up on, our privilege.
If “home lies in ‘re-membering,’” then home is not a place, but an ongoing process. To traverse land is to trace the steps of your forebears, and to travel in search of heritage is to access our past by living fiercely in the present and finding what stories live there.
CJ Hauser’s interrogation of familial and cultural stories reveals as much about what it means to love someone else as it does about what it means to love a narrative. Ultimately, this leads her inward, turning the force of her questioning toward the unexpected shape of her own life story.
“Now in my second pregnancy, I am turning to fiction, in particular a spate of recently published novels that portray the challenges of the postpartum period and early motherhood, to make sense of my attempts to hold together the identities of writer and mother.”
The essays of Febos’s new essay collection read less like a coming-of-age story than they do like a manifesto of all the ways girlhood takes a toll on a girl’s life, as well as of the cultural experience of being a woman.
Betasamosake’s work exemplifies the brilliant possibilities of hybrid forms. Hybridity in genre allows Indigenous literature the freedom to shape-shift, to tell a story the best way it can be told, and to let that story live among its relatives, whether they be short story, memoir, or song.
The portrayal of women’s bodies in Irish literature, and in wider society, has created an impossible contradiction. Irish author and critic Sinéad Gleeson’s debut essay collection, chronicling life in the human body as it experiences illness, love, grief, and motherhood, however, marks a contribution that will widen our understanding of Irish identity.
Barrett Swanson’s essays rigorously interrogate the intersection between capitalism, masculinity, and the “gnawing sense of purposelessness” pervasive in our country’s psyche, while also adding an undeniable empathetic and interpersonal dimension that satisfies a reader’s desire for emotionally specific narrative intrigue.
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