As many COVID-era courses have moved from seminar rooms to Zoom meetings, the haptic nature of teaching has changed. Is anything lost?
Tag: Literature
Public Thinker: Hua Hsu on Reading until You See Double
“When I write, I try to begin from a place of authority and then I try to lose it over time. I want to transfer it to the reader.”
Dirty Essays, Clean Essays
Recently translated essay collections underscore how sanitized ethical language has become in the last 60 to 70 years.
Leïla Slimani’s Taboos
Franco-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani reveals the dirty underside of bourgeois domesticity. Is her taboo breaking worthy of praise?
Books and Abandonment
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season makes other authors’ moral delicacy look like condescension.
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 ...
Translating Italy, Translating Blackness
For two Black womxn translators, bringing Afro-Italian stories into English is an act of radical self-love and resistance.
Building Black Futures in Italy
When will new generations of Afro-Italians finally be heard and recognized as full and active members of Italy’s culture and society?
“Lovecraft Country”: A Spell Gone Awry
Lovecraft Country runs on a formula: genre clichés—however racist—only need to be painted over, so as to be enjoyed without guilt.
Longing for the Writer’s Space
How should readers and scholars look on the tangible traces writers leave behind?
Surviving Hard Times with al-Hariri
Forget traditional “heroes.” The protagonists of some centuries-old stories are social climbers and tricksters, even cheats and cowards.
This Is Not an Essay on Poetry of the Past 20 Years
I am tired of catalogues and catalogue poems, and of surveys and surveillance—though I appreciate a bird’s-eye view of the terrain as well as anyone.
How to Fake a 19th-Century Novel
If Cloud Atlas is any guide, one of the best ways to sound like a bygone novelist is to make your narrator sound like a racist.
The Secluded Self: Sinclair Lewis’s “Main Street” @100
Why did Americans start distrusting small towns? The answer is one book, in which a woman moves from the city—and loses her freedom.
The Realism of Our Times: Kim Stanley Robinson on How Science Fiction Works
“We're in a science fiction novel now that we are all co-writing together.”
Unruly Objects
By making familiar objects strange, two new books of poetry reveal the limits of overly simple critique.
B-Sides: Daisy Ashford’s “The Young Visiters”
A child’s novel can be funny by revealing how much a child does know, after all.
Ferrante Breaks the Frame
A defaced family photograph—with an ancestor cut out—reveals to Ferrante’s new protagonist how women are erased by the words and deeds of men.
The Once and Future Temp
What can the history of the temp-work industry teach us about the precarity of modern working life?
Carolyn Heilbrun Told You So
The late literary scholar hoped the writings of older feminists in the academy would help younger women “name their anger and find companionship in enduring it.”
