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Books

Reviews, reflections, conversations.

The Conventionalist
The Conventionalist

Defying the Greeks and the British Middle Class: A.M. Homes'May We Be Forgiven

By Patrick McGinty
I realize that 'to segue from one scene to the next' sounds like a terribly generic description of how all narrative art functions, but few writers segue as quickly as Homes. Just as you're connecting...more

Mostly Novels
Mostly Novels

Marriage, Equality, and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

By Emily Burns Morgan
Shakespeare and Austen are, for Woolf, examples of writers who have achieved this equilibrium. Charlotte Bronte is her example of one who has not. While I understand what Woolf means, I can't help disagreeing...more

Aisles
Aisles

The Living and the Dead, Intermingling Gracefully in Pasadena

By Rachel Greben
Millet's interests here are the subterranean currents of love and attachment, and she is an expert at depicting the interplay of memory and shifting time in the real world. She conveys how learning to live with the dead is where an increasing...more

The Conventionalist
The Conventionalist

Truth, Nuance, and Times Genre Snobbery: Why Piazza's City of Refuge Deserves our Attention

By Patrick McGinty
Great works of art bear more resemblance than disparity. We...more

Mostly Novels
Mostly Novels

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, 2000

By Emily Burns Morgan
The chronicler, Iris, acknowledges her own slack characterization of the men in her drama, but seems to feel this is not much of a problem. The men are not really the point, after all. The point is what happened to Iris and Laura...more

Short Work
Short Work

In a Way That's Bearable: Alan Heathcock's Volt

By Chelsea Bieker
If there's one thing I love, it's a bunch of good, winding, layered, place-driven stories. I want to experience the desperation of history in short fiction, the calling of a cursed land reverberating through each character...more

Reading Lines
Reading Lines

Paul Valery: "Perfume is what the flowers throw away"

By Wendy Bourgeois
I'd prefer to think of the inner me as vanilla ice cream, the same all the way to the bottom of the carton. One can predict the behavior of vanilla ice cream with a fair amount of certainty. On the other hand, thinking ourselves...more

Mostly Novels
Mostly Novels

The World According to Garp by John Irving, 1978

By Emily Burns Morgan
I met John Irving in college when he came to visit as part of my school’s reading series. About a week before the event, I received an invitation to a small...more

Arts

Crafted, designed, choreographed, performed.

Film

Art form of the twentieth century.

Music

Stolen licks and backstage passes.

The Listener

On Record Spinning Vinyl

"On Record": A Film by Chloe Woida

Chatting with record collectors about vinyl, tactility, and that particular sound...more

Revisited

Revisited Date With a Baddish Boy

A Stranger Got It: Stone Temple Pilots' Core

By Jessica Machado
I had undertaken a new identity--alternative chick--and this lone disc was my calling card. This was also the summer I went on my very first date, a.k.a. the season that...more

Inquiry

Investigations and lived experience.

Revisited

Magnum Sellick in Hawaii

Tan Knight in a Red Ferrari: Rewatching "Magnum, P.I."

By Jessica Machado
But real talk, ladies: If you met Magnum in a bar and he confessed that the Ferrari wasn't his and that he lives for free in a mansion owned by a guy no one ever sees, would that stop you from sleeping with him? I didn't think so...more

Personal

Two Empty Rooms, Memphis, Tennessee Civil Rights Movement

Two Empty Rooms, Memphis, Tennessee

By Benjamin Craig
The museum is located inside the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while standing on a second-floor balcony just outside his room. Much of the hotel has been renovated to...more

Poetry

Language, pushed.

Reading Lines

Reading Lines Are Poets Better People?

Paul Valery: "Perfume is what the flowers throw away"

By Wendy Bourgeois
Valery is talking here about the idea that our visible temperament is what our essence rejects. So, you know, if I’m nice to old ladies that’s because there’s a hatefulness lurking around my inner subway station, too attached to... more

Late Night Library

Late Night Library Two-Headed Nightingale

Bernhardt and Seybold on Shara Lessley's Two-Headed Nightingale

Late Night Library presents a conversation between Propeller's Lucas Bernhardt and Sarah Seybold about Shara Lessley's debut collection, Two-Headed Nightingale. more