We Play Ourselves by Jen Silverman
Silverman’s debut novel is not only a story about how all-consuming artistic ambition can be, but also a poignant portrait of how much an artist can learn to love her work.
Blog Archives
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Long Poems, Long Sentences
After almost fifty years of his poetry, Muldoon has prepared his readers for a journey not through our own predictable circles—these syntactical maps rule out one’s own choice between right or left—but to arrive somewhere comfortably unexpected.
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“I really try to let the characters speak for themselves”: An Interview with Brandon Hobson
Hobson’s latest novel is a brilliant, artfully crafted story of Native heritage, family dynamics, and ancestral hope.
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Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel Moniz
In this debut story collection, the reader feels the story in their body as they read; Moniz makes us look directly at the source of trauma in order to share the pain.
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The Handmaid’s Tale and the Silencing of a Woman’s Voice
While many have praised the book’s feminist themes, none have noticed that the Hulu adaptation highlights Atwood’s special warning intended for women writers, historians, artists, and documentarians. In a patriarchal society turned radical and violent, a woman’s voice will be stifled by taking away the written word.
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Remembering the Future
Since reading Natalia Ginzburg’s 1963 novel last year, I have wanted to identify and investigate my own family lexicon, the basis of our unity in the pressure of our semi-quarantine in a two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment with no yard and not much of a view.
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The Hare by Melanie Finn
Finn gives us an important, comprehensive picture of the stages of a woman’s learning, suggesting that, over time, teachers will be rejected, new ones sought, and the student might herself become a teacher.
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This Land Made You
Melissa Faliveno’s 2020 essay collection’s genius, and tenderness, comes from a deep understanding of the language of home: the haunting, often unacknowledged pull place has on us, and how leaning towards and pushing against this pull shapes our identities.
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Jack London’s Visionary 1912 Pandemic Novel
London’s book is impressive not just for its correctly intuited factual predictions, but also for those related to the way the inequities of his world would only grow exponentially as its population did, and the way those inequities would define the events that took place during and after the plague.
