The Enigmatic Figure of the Midwife in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders
The midwife has often been an ambiguous figure both in the history of literature and within the history of labor.
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Leonora Carrington and the Queer Divine
Glittering with playful weirdness alongside mystical spirituality, Leonora Carrington’s “My Mother is a Cow” converges with the Christian tradition of divine incarnation and infuses it with queerness.
The Enigma of Desire
André Aciman’s 2017 novel is a story specifically focused on desire in all of its forms, but it is the desire to reinvent oneself through romantic love that haunts the novel and is its motivating force.
Power and Obsession in Devotion
The scale of privilege constantly shifts in Madeline Stevens’ debut novel, fostering a lethal combination of gratitude, jealousy, and resentment within its protagonist.
The Desire of Girls in Machine
Rather than being a juvenile or simplistic depiction of desire as purely a physical impulse for the adolescent narrator, Susan Steinberg’s first novel presents desire in the mind of an adolescent girl as a larger force, one that is as much existential as it is universal.
Bipolar Disorder and the Pills that Keep Us Alive
For bipolar disorder, the most tried and true treatment—the most effective one—doesn’t come from a lab; it comes from stardust. It’s an element on the periodic table, atomic number 3.
Writing Racist Characters
There are uniquely white stories that all white people know intimately, and that we aren’t telling: stories of white people perpetrating racism.
SoundMachine by Rachel Zucker
In her new book, Rachel Zucker questions if her family is a distraction from her poetry, or if her poetry is a distraction from her family.
Imagination and the American West
Carys Davies’ debut novel reveals that mythologies often arise from foolish beginnings but that the elevated stories that emerge are no less valuable.