Ha Seong-nan’s Bluebeard’s First Wife
Ha is invested not in the myth itself but in what it helps us see. In her hands, the fairy-tale works as a photo filter, bringing into clearer relief her actual subject: the horrors of daily contemporary life.
Blog
Fiction and Fault in the Age of Heroin
I remember the books I brought to the sober home. I started talking to the other residents about them, even though I’d never opened them up. I would say this or that, something arbitrary or vague. It was intoxicating to displace myself, to wash myself with fictions I couldn’t claim sincerely.
The Musicality of Memory in The Hakawati
Rabih Alamaddine’s 2008 novel unleashes music and sound to interrogate the deeply profound and sublime in the seemingly mundane and ordinary.
Lexicon Land
Florida is in a constant state of post-apocalypse. Authors are not immune to this speculative affliction, and when they set their fantasies in Florida, the reinvention of language abounds.
Emma Cline’s Fairy Tale Gone Wrong
To Cline’s Evie, a young girl whose parents are too preoccupied with their respective post-divorce transformations to truly see her and support her, leaving the mild, mind-numbing safety of her small-town and stepping onto a cult leader’s ranch is like stepping into a fairy tale world.
A Burning by Megha Majumdar
Megha Majumdar’s debut novel forces us to see the inequities in the world, and the way desire for freedom is so often thwarted.
The Grounding Power of the Past
The gravitational pull of the physical is a placeholder for the mental, emotional, and spiritual work that Sarah M. Broom’s 2019 book, and the stories within, is doing.
James Alan McPherson’s Masterpieces
I am inevitably an outsider to the worlds McPherson wrote about and can only understand them as such, but for me his writing cut across race, culture, age, and geography to reach the most ignorant of audiences, and to show me what a real “masterpiece” looked like.
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
Shibli is a deft chronicler of the blinkering of life wrought by oppressive regimes, the way their manifold codes and proscriptions tighten around perception like a coil of barbed wire.