Tag
Literature
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The Golden Age of TV
“Danielewski, it seems, is not acting as a writer here, but as a hoarder of phrases, the more redolent of a vanished “Western” mode of living, the better.”
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Introduction to Afropantheology
Afropantheology seeks the freedom of the artist to express stories unbridled by Western labels and terminologies and the need for conformity to defined (often limited) literary standards.
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“We Thought We Were Living in an Enlightened Age”: Talking with Artem Chapeye
“Many people who call themselves very patriotic, even nationalist, leave [Ukraine], while the people who are actually protecting it are the common people.”
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“Gestures of Refusal”: A Conversation with Sarah Bernstein and Daisy Lafarge
“Why do we want our characters to be innocent, as if we are innocent ourselves?”
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Really Unreal: Salman Rushdie’s “Victory City”
Rushdie’s fifteenth novel casts doubt on the very production of historical knowledge.
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A Forensic Level of Honesty: Aminatta Forna and Nicole Rizzuto
“There came a point in my life … where I realized that almost every narrative, whatever it came from, that dealt with an African country was pretty much a rewriting of ‘Heart of Darkness.’”
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“Our Hands”: Reading with DeafBlind Poet John Lee Clark
Clark’s poetry collection questions how those excluded from spoken conversation devise new avenues for transmission.
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Edgar Gomez on “High-Risk Homosexual”
In this latest episode of the Writing Latinos podcast, we talk about machismo, cockfighting, reconciling with parents, the Pulse nightclub shooting, bilingualism in contemporary literature, and the “messiness” of latinidad.
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Writing the Counter-Book: Joshua Cohen with Eugene Sheppard
“I was exorcising, if not the anxiety of influence, then the accusations of the anxiety of influence, and also issuing somewhat of a corrective.”
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Saying Goodbye to Childhood: An Interview with Javier Zamora
“I hope people will see the heartbreak of a little kid having to grow up and say goodbye to his childhood in order to survive.”
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B-Sides: Fran Ross’s Oreo
“Oreo” is not the easiest read, but it is a book that is, in many ways, written against ease.
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Futures of Postimperial Glasgow
Britain’s “Second City” profited from shipbuilding and the slave trade, but has slowly declined for decades. What should Glasgow’s future hold?
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What Counts as a Bestseller?
A fundamental truth about bestseller lists? They are not a neutral window into what the public is really reading.
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Where Is All the Book Data?
Industry is already using data to remake culture. To reverse the tide—to make culture more equitable—we need to decode that data for ourselves.
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“The War Conquers You Not Only Physically”: Darya Tsymbalyuk on Plants and Humans in Ukraine
For several years, Darya Tsymbalyuk has been drafting a new history of Ukraine’s Donbas that overturns our assumptions. Rather than focus on the industrialization and war that have dominated the region, she interviews locals and asks them to draw maps of their hometowns, based on their memories and emotional connections. The resulting maps—which emerge in…
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The Text: Do Not Disturb
Does loving a work of literature mean seizing it? How should critics feel about their feelings toward a text?
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Many into One, One into Many: George Lamming (1927–2022)
Lamming never lets readers forget that within that one man—as within all of us—is a boiling multitude.
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B-Sides: J. G. Farrell’s “Troubles”
His characters—in 1919 Ireland, 1857 India, and 1940 Singapore—intuit that the world is about to collapse. But they can do nothing to save it.
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One More Embrace: Octavia’s Future/Present
Butler’s work helps us see how time is a spiral, how the present moment is always layered with multiple pasts and underlying alternate futures.
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Octavia E. Butler: The Next 75 Years
Rather than politically utopian, Butler’s stories teach us about grief, consolation, hope, and—most of all—how to live in struggle.
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The World Continues to Need Octavia E. Butler
Pandemics, racist violence, climate change, democratic collapse: it’s finally clear that it’s Butler’s world. We’re just living in it.
