Heinrich von Kleist teaches how to resist heteronormativity, as well as how to imagine gender fluidity and a less restrictive masculinity.
Tag: Fiction
Motherhood and Other Monsters
In The Babadook and The Need, the introduction of a monster amplifies preexisting anxieties, rather than generating fresh ones.
Caught Mapping
The fires that are burning across Australia are changing this place, quite possibly forever, and with it our natural, social, cultural, and political narratives.
We Other Victorians
The late 19th and early 21st centuries share a common loss of technological innocence.
Nancy Hale, at Last
Hale's stories reveal that the woman who’s right is still the one kept up at night.
Writing the Latinx Bildungsroman
Before our eyes, US Latinx writers are inventing a new form of the novel. The classic bildungsroman, or novel of education and development, typically ...
B-Sides: Denis Williams’s “Other Leopards”
Denis Williams was a painter in London, a novelist in the Sudan, an art historian in Nigeria, and an archeologist in his native Guyana: the polymath’s polymath ...
Dead Cosmonauts, Space Cowboys
Heroes are in the skies. This was true for the Greeks, who named constellations for great hunters and queens; for First Nations astronomers, who told stories ...
Stephen McCauley on What Makes a Comic Novel
Stephen McCauley is the author of a bevy—a raft, even—of beloved comic novels. Recent ones include My Ex-Life, Alternatives to Sex, and ...
The Posthuman Enlightenment
What does it take to think beyond the human? Can we imagine our human selves in other lives? And should we? While contemporary answers to these ...
B-Sides: Gene Stratton-Porter’s “A Girl of the Limberlost”
All but forgotten today, Gene Stratton-Porter was—in the early 20th century ...
Novels of Colombia’s Patriarchy
Fathers dead and fathers dying—as well as adult children struggling to leave their fathers’ shadow—shape two recent novels from Colombia. Though one concerns a ...
Internet Dystopias after Trump
Fitting chaos into form is what genre was made for. But what does it mean for our literature—let alone our society—when reality suddenly turns wolfishly against ...
Ray Bradbury on War, Recycling, and Artificial Intelligence
One of the roles of science fiction is to provide readers with a glimpse of how ...
Asimov’s Empire, Asimov’s Wall
Isaac Asimov loved large numbers. He was born a century ago this month, and when he died, in 1992, he was both the most famous science fiction writer in the ...
“To Reach the Pure Realm of the Imaginary”: A Conversation with Cixin Liu
The renowned Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu is best known as the author of the best-selling, Obama-beloved, Hugo-winning, and truly mind-bending trilogy ...
Machines Like Me, but They Love You
In almost any book about artificial life, there comes a moment when the humans, like Victor Frankenstein, are obliged to confront the full reality of what they’ve ...
Ben Lerner’s Intoxicating Honesty
Does fiction require anonymity? And if an author chooses to draw heavily from their own life, and the lives of those they know and love, how should a reader judge ...
Fairy Tales of Race and Nation
In its own allusive way, Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread considers the imminent departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. A textbook in ...
Power, Poison, Pain, and Joy
Sitting atop a police car beneath an oversized American flag, Kendrick Lamar opened the 2015 BET awards with his single “Alright.” “We hate the po-po ...
