“The books from ‘Trainspotting’ onwards have been about deindustrialization … the cruel existential panic that we feel, in the sense that we don’t really know what we’re here for anymore.”
Fiction
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“The whiteboy said there was nothing left for me in Houston, he said that I didn’t have to punish myself, and he said my name, my actual name.”
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Fiction, Story
If Only There Were Someone Who Would Listen
Dror Burstein’s “Muck” sets a difficult course through themes of power, pita bread, and invasion, mixing up the biblical past and the just-as-lamentable present.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Food, Profiles & Interviews, Story, Writing
Helen Oyeyemi on ‘Gingerbread,’ Fairy Tales, and What Self-Branding Is Doing to Childhood
“I was thinking a lot about childhood as this special status, an almost endangered status … that is eroded the more that we start thinking of ourselves as these units of value and worrying about what we’re worth.”
Posted inBooks, Current Events, Fiction, Story
A Citizen Is Obliged To Listen
When a refugee flees to another country and claims asylum, she is, in effect, petitioning the state to listen to her story.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Science Fiction, Story, Writing
‘Every Woman Writer Feels Like She’s Starting Over Without Any Guides’
Ann Leckie talks about “The Raven Tower,” the erasure of women writers from the canon, the privilege inherent to ‘the anxiety of influence,’ and the power of tradition.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘What Would Social Media Be Like As the World Is Ending?’
In Mark Doten’s “Trump Sky Alpha,” a journalist who has survived Trump’s nuclear apocalypse gets an assignment from what’s left of the New York Times Magazine: find out what people were tweeting as the bombs fell.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
If You Were a Sack of Cumin
In the midst of the Syrian Civil War, three grown siblings attempt to fulfill their father’s final wish. The journey is dangerous, but that’s no surprise; nowadays, death is always hard work.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘Archive, Archive, Archive’: Valeria Luiselli on Reading In Order To Write
To write “Lost Children Archive,” Valeria Luiselli studied the refugee crisis “obliquely,” reading about other historical moments of children’s mass displacement, amassing a reader’s archive of loss.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Joe Scapellato on “The Made-Up Man” and the Myth of the Self
In Scapellato’s new novel, a man is pulled into a noir detective mystery he doesn’t want to solve.