Maggie Nelson’s Complication of Freedom
In her 2021 book, Maggie Nelson comes to identify and appreciate freedom’s paradox—that true freedom comes with an understanding of limits, or an appreciation of the idea of constraint.
Blog Archives
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Oliver Sacks and the Narratives of Disability
Oliver Sacks recognized that stories have a closer connection to the full complexity of the human condition than science. Nine years after the birth of my daughter, however, I realized that most existing narratives tell us more about cultural misconceptions of Down syndrome than providing a full, complex picture of human experience.
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Conversation in The Affirmations
The poems in Luke Hathaway’s new collection demand attention, both with their often austere beauty and their rich and challenging depth of reference, but these poems contain so much conversation that it would feel strange to read the book in absolute isolation.
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“Grief with animals isn’t the same, and we can learn something from that”: An Interview with Annie Hartnett
By combining the voices of the dead with the experiences of the living, Annie Hartnett builds a sense of community. Her characters are not navigating hardships in isolation but with the support of family and friends, animals and the dead.
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Collective Despair in Ana Blandiana’s Five Books
The poems in Romanian poet Ana Blandiana’s collection offer an uncensored, searing reality of the poverty that Communism created, depicted as an imagistic tragedy from the perspective of those who suffered through it.
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Doing Nothing and Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir explores a restlessness she spends her sojourn contending with. It is a restlessness brought on by a rift that has formed between her mind and her body, a restlessness shared by all of us who were raised on the lap of the Protestant work ethic.
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Imagination and Repetition in Chronic Illness Memoir
The aesthetic project of chronic illness memoir is inescapably tied to its political project. Within the wider genre, we might discern a politics of repetition.
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The Queer Power of Fairy Tales
In a country in which “fairy tales predetermine reality,” the protagonist of Katya Kazbek’s new novel’s re-creation of a folk tale allows him to engineer his queer liberation.
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Authenticity and Artifice in The Candy House
At its most fundamental level, Jennifer Egan’s new novel is about stories, about how humans are inclined to shape information into narrative.
