The World of Yesterday’s Documentation of the Great Wars
Stefan Zweig’s autobiography serves as a poignant warning as the world grapples with the rise of ethno-nationalism.
politics
Love in the Time of Tear Gas: THE NIX’s Wild Literary Style Crashes Epically Against Its Vision of Our Diminishing Culture
The most distinctive trait of novels like The Nix is the ensemble, and the guiding principle is a recognizably American one: the bigger, the better.
“There’s only one subject. That’s the trouble”: DeLillo and Saunders in 2017
The first paragraph I wrote after reading Saunders’s essay felt exhausting. Every sentence felt vague and hollow. But good: a feeling akin to my physical therapist standing beside me, correcting the form on my squats. Painful but good when I got it right.
Writers Descend on Washington, Promptly Resist
The literary community descended on Washington, DC last week for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ annual conference, and participants seized the opportunity to register their dissent with the current administration.
Communists and Cassoulet: Julia Child on Dried Herbs, Dull Knives and Joseph McCarthy
If Julia Child and Avis deVoto were here today, they’d be great Facebook friends. Julia and Avis bonded over food—buying it, cooking it and eating it. But since they were without technology, they wrote letters, which Joan Reardon collected into a book titled As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto.
Obama the Ellisonian: Another Reading of the President’s Worldview
Early in the speech that Barack Obama gave last year to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” standing in front of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, the president asked, “What can be more American than what happened in this place?” That line deserved more attention than it got. To recap what happened there:…
Who Speaks How
I love when people ask my friend Jenny and I how we know each other, because long before we co-taught a queer theory elective and drove cross-country and made parallel moves to Pittsburgh, she was one of my first writing teachers. It was in her Xeroxed handout of eclectic love poems that I first read…
Looking Otherwise
We are one month post-“Formation.” In the wake of Beyoncé’s video release (/Super Bowl halftime performance/world tour announcement), a frenzy of reactions and reactions to reactions has proliferated. Only they’re not just reactions, they’re readings. On the immediate surface of the song’s lyrics, “Formation” is about being Black, and crucially also about looking Black, about…
The Place of Zines in Contemporary American Politics
Zines straddle the border between Fluxist market-dodgers and the reputably tainted world of self-publishing literary dropouts. The difference between a zine and that 50 Shades of Grey-inspired alien erotica novel is function and intention. A zine works as a platform for writing and art that’s too provocative, political, or honest for traditional newsstand publications….