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.
Blog
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.
Desire and Destruction in Kate Folk’s Out There
Kate Folk’s narrative voice makes even the strangest, most self-destructive desires seem reasonable. Her stories exist between the strange and the familiar, and the ambivalence that characters feel about what they’re doing or what’s happening to them makes them feel all the more real.
Sara Lippmann’s Turns in Jerks
Even though the characters in Sara Lippmann’s second story collection are often stuck in their lives, a sense of life, of possibility, of creation, runs throughout the book, uniting its stories as one. Lippmann focuses on the unexpected and on the surprising in order to focus on life.
“Women carry so much of this love and its afterlife”: An Interview with Megan Mayhew Bergman
The stories in Megan Mayhew Bergman’s third collection deal with the idea of inheritance—what parts of themselves women bequeath to their children, to one another, to men, and what’s left once those parts are given away.
A House Between Earth and the Moon’s Technology Tension
Rebecca Scherm’s approach to technology is both familiar and alien to us. Our devices pull us further apart from one other. Yet this sense of hyper-connection is still connection. Read through the register of family, the relational potential for technology gets even murkier.
Finding Home in An American Sunrise
Joy Harjo’s 2019 collection accesses the painful memories and losses that so many of her people have suffered. But the strength of her poetry goes beyond just recounting the pain.
Facing Pandemic Memories in Mary Jo Salter’s Zoom Rooms
The poems in Mary Jo Salter’s collection invite readers to consider what we will remember from a time that feels unforgettable now. As COVID-19 begins to take up less and less space in our heads, will it be more than distant memory, something almost unintelligible to future generations?
“Girlhood is a much darker, more complex—more amazing—experience than what that association suggests”: An Interview with Melissa Febos
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.