Eat the Mouth That Feeds You by Carribean Fragoza
In her debut collection, Fragoza imagines a world where patriarchy can be eradicated and finds beauty in how Chicanx women come together.
Blog
Othering and Empathy in Such a Fun Age
Kiley Reid’s debut novel delicately and insightfully examines the naiveté and smugness exhibited by people who consider themselves allies yet only understand how to speak and behave as allies in times of clear and immediate strife—and who, even then, are only familiar with the performative aspects of the task.
Beauty and Crystal Boys
Pai Hsien-Yung’s 1983 novel is a story of exile: the narrative centers itself on the transience of home, and the chaos of the birth-family, in order to argue that home does not come from location, but from aesthetics—from beauty.
On Master Suffering
CM Burroughs’s poems invite intersubjective understanding, even “so much empathy,” while also insisting on the speaker’s self-ownership, the space between self and other. They interrogate mastery and also resist it; the collection is rife with rich ambiguities.
The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernandez
In her new novel, Nona Fernandez delves into the fluctuations of memory, highlighting the media and society’s role in what we remember.
Swamplandia!’s Grief
Reflective on themes of environmental degradation and indigenous erasure, Karen Russel’s 2011 novel serves as a memorial to Florida’s past, and as a reminder of the constant fortitude we must maintain to protect this place.
Reading Rilke in Lockdown
I’ve found myself turning to Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems again and again over the last year, his words giving me space to release myself from the prison of my own feelings, and offer an alternative, even curative, way to live in the world.
Love Like That by Emma Duffy-Comparone
Emma Duffy-Comparone’s debut refuses to shield the reader from unsavory elements of a story.
“What are the conditions of contemplation to exist in an alien planet?”: An Interview with Mauro Javier Cárdenas
Reading Cárdenas’s second novel, with its intricately patterned sentences circling obsessively around an absent center, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the author has done something remarkable, inventing an entirely original language for representing the fractured sensation of being conscious in the twenty-first century.