Visualizing Loneliness in Kristen Radtke’s Seek You
Using the strengths of the graphic medium, Kristen Radtke conveys how loneliness feels by portraying what it looks like.
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On the Confederate Flag
I’m driving in silence on State Highway 70, except for this truck that is motoring slow, and its exhaust pipe chokes like the engine is cutting off. The truck bed is rusted, exposing the primer. Still visible, though the paint is chipped, is the red, white, and blue star-crossed Confederate flag glorified on the tailgate
The Parallel Narrative Arc in Memorial
In Bryan Washington’s first novel, photos are used, in part, to consider how we use images to communicate. They also work together to create a narrative arc that echoes the arc of the book itself.
Authorship and Betrayal in To Write As If Already Dead
Given its fragmented structure, intertextuality, quotations from and reflections on correspondences, and inclusion of the narrative of a pregnancy, Kate Zambreno’s newest book feels like a “library of the mind,” encompassing texts on reading, writing, authorship, friendship, betrayal, the body, birth, and death.
Fox & I and the Power of Unusual Friendships
Catherine Raven’s friendship with a fox that wanders onto her property highlights the challenges she’s struggled with for years—an urge to isolate in a world that celebrates civilization, a belief in magic in a world of scientific inquiry, and a strong intuition that what is most common isn’t necessarily what is most natural.
Cruelty’s Resonant Line
Ai’s complex depictions, in her 1970 collection of poetry, of contradictory emotions, desperation, character triangles, and speakers driven to and past the brink of perpetrating harm work because she employs minimalism in her poetic devices, including heavy use of the end-stopped line.
Cruel Compassion in Zülfü Livaneli’s Disquiet
The characters in Zülfü Livaneli’s Disquiet cross borders, enter lives, and make real distant traumas for those whose only knowledge of the Syrian Civil War is from headlines.
This Mournable Body’s Unrelenting “You”
What has been overlooked in analysis of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Booker Prize nominated novel is her use of the second-person perspective in combination with the simple present tense—creating a readerly experience of selfhood and time that does more than the second-person can alone.
The Uncategorizable Filthy Animals
Brandon Taylor’s second book and first story collection, coming in quick succession to his Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, reads like a landmark of millennial fiction, revealing an even clearer picture of the expansiveness of Taylor’s vision than his rigorously structured debut.