Sometimes a flower is just a flower, and sometimes it’s a powerful vehicle for giving free rein to our worst colonialist and misogynist impulses.
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Posted inProfiles & Interviews
Publishing the Best of the Desert: An Interview With Ken Layne
“If you’re doing something small, something that’s mostly your labor and vision, then stick to what makes you satisfied.”
Posted inBooks, Current Events, Member Pick, Story
Putin’s Rasputin
Journalist Amos Barshad meets with “Putin whisperer” Aleksandr Dugin to try to understand how a shadowy advisor exerts influence.
Posted inBooks, History, Nonfiction, Story, Unapologetic Women
A Minor Figure
While searching for photographs that depict black young women and girls living free in the second and third generations born after slavery, Saidiya Hartman finds a disturbing image.
Posted inProfiles & Interviews, Story
‘I Try Not to Have a Schedule’: Talking Writing with William Vollmann
Renowned for the size of his books as the magnitude of his subjects, the author is ready to take on waste and climate change.
Posted inNonfiction
Demonology: A Woman’s Right to Fury
In an excerpt from her new book, Darcey Steinke investigates — and debunks — the demonization of anger within the female body.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
On Barbs and Demogorgons: A Stranger Things Reading List
After the binge-watching comes the binge-reading.
Posted inFiction, Nonfiction, Quotes
Obama by the Books
In Vulture, book critic Christian Lorentzen suggests we dispense with terms like “postmodern” and “postwar” when discussing novels, and instead analyze them relative to the presidential administrations under which they were released. What will we mean when someday we refer to Obama Lit? I think we’ll be discussing novels about authenticity, or about “problems of […]
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Nonfiction, Story
On Subtlety
What’s so great about having things spelled out clearly?
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
Did the Modern Novel Kill Charles Bovary?
Jean Améry, the Austrian essayist and Primo Levi’s former barrack-mate at Auschwitz, wrote one last novel before he died. Its six angry chapters are written as if by Charles Bovary, accusing Flaubert of ruining his life.
