We humans as a species have difficulty accepting that our heroes are made of the same plain stuff as the rest of us, which is why it can be so difficult to write a hero story in which the protagonist’s heroic actions appear, well, human. Rolf Yngve’s story, “A Prerogative,” (Kenyon Review March/April 2015)…
Gutshot Amelia Gray FSG Originals Published: 4/14/15 224 pages $14.00 If Amelia Gray’s collection, Gutshot, was choreography, it would be comprised of violent, animalistic phrases: bodies smashing into each other and hands clawing into skin. But on the page, these assembled short stories use a vocabulary of the body to examine the manifestation of humanity’s…
How do I remember spaces? Bedrooms, beaches, backseats, bazaars. The time between dreams. Night. The no-man’s land of a twelve-hour flight. I remember the world as words. I spent my last few weeks in Delhi hunting for books. For relatives, for friends, but, finally, for my own sake: to call back India when I was…
Roger Ebert once wrote that video games could never be art, which later he would go on to clarify that what he actually meant was video games could never claim the status of “high art,” like that of, oh, say, cinema? While I would obviously refute this sentiment as a teacher of creative writing for…
Book retailer Barnes & Noble recently released a new line of shopping bags in the hope of incentivizing in-store purchases. In an article at Bloomberg Business, Belinda Banks writes that the new bags “evoke an old-fashioned etching, with the words set in a serif font and forming an image evocative of the story. For The Wizard…
Michael Jordan and the New Global CapitalismWalter LaFeberW.W. Norton, 1999191 Pages Buy: book | ebook It doesn’t take very long for a revolution to seem quaint. In 1999, the year that Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism was published by Cornell Professor Emeritus of history Walter LaFeber, the concept of a cellular telephone was…
Inside most classrooms lives a beast, many-eyed. If you’ve been a student in a classroom, especially in those early grades when a year lasts an eon, you’ve been part of this beast. You saw your elementary-school teachers with a collective, sharpened vision (their combovers, fluffy perms, paunches, thick, magnifying glasses) as you sat, caged and…
The traditional short story’s primary building blocks depend heavily on logic. A character’s desire meets with a series of escalating obstacles until finally a climax is reached and that desire is fulfilled (or not) in a satisfying, plausible way. Melissa Goodrich’s “Anna George” (Passages North, Issue 36) flows far more associatively through its title…
“There is only one of you in all time; this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.”—Martha Graham Dance was my first foray into art, and I studied it for sixteen years with the kind of blind passion you can only…
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