A Longreads Exclusive: The newly translated short story from Silvina Ocampo’s collection, Thus Were Their Faces.
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Sci-Fi Is for Everyone: Six Stories About Marginalized Groups in Science Fiction
Genre literature has power. Mainstream science fiction, historically, has a representation problem. (Why are there no black people in the future? Or, better yet, why is there only one black person in the future?! Did LGBTQ people disappear, too?) Where does that leave us?
E.M. Forster on the Novel and Why Aristotle Was Wrong About Character
The specialty of the novel is that the writer can talk about his characters as well as through them or can arrange for us to listen when they talk to themselves. He has access to self-communings, and from that level he can descend even deeper and peer into the subconscious.
STAT: My Daughter’s MS Diagnosis and the Question My Doctors Couldn’t Answer
Is there a dietary treatment for multiple sclerosis? And if so, why is the medical establishment ignoring published academic research that started in the 1950s proving it?
Curtis Sittenfeld’s ‘Prep,’ 10 Years Later
Sittenfeld’s smart debut novel about social dynamics at an exclusive boarding school remains relevant—and not just as a “coming of age novel”—a decade after it was first published.
The Unanswered Question of Race in Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing
It is seldom mentioned that Poe came of age in a slave society, in a household where slaves were present. Poe does nothing to draw attention to the fact. An account of the business interests of Poe’s foster father, John Allan, quoted by the biographer Jeffrey Meyers, notes that he and his partner “as a […]
Defending Journalist Joseph Mitchell
In the April issue of the New York Review of Books Janet Malcolm wrote about the legendary New Yorker journalist Joseph Mitchell, and responded to Thomas Kunkel’s new Mitchell biography. The biography reveals how Mitchell invented some of his beloved material, which raises questions about larger journalistic standards, betraying readers’ trust, and what effect Mitchell’s invention and embellishment might have on […]
A Liberated Woman: The Story of Margaret King
Inspired by her governess, the radical feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret King cast aside her immense privilege, cross-dressed as a man to go to medical school, and inspired a new generation of women to push against the rigid conventions of their era.
The Cult Could Become a Church: On David Foster Wallace
If you’ve never heard of this acclaimed author, treasure your last moments of innocence; then, read this primer at Vulture on DFW’s contested legacy.
Sci-Fi Is for Everyone: Six Stories About Marginalized Groups in Science Fiction
“I’ve included essays about women in sci-fi, as well as queer representation in the genre, because it’s a thrill to see traditionally marginalized groups take on a genre that has so much to offer them. Sci-fi should be for everyone.”
