Ladies Night at the Dreamland
The Dreamland is expansive, and you get the sense that Livingston would give every woman in history her moment on the stage if we lingered long enough to watch.
Swimming with Oliver
1. After a swim, that’s when I miss him most. In November, when the water temperature is in the sixties, when I’ve toweled off and put on my bathrobe and started up the leaf-strewn lawn from the dock to my house, that’s when I think: I have to phone Oliver and tell him what a […]
A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write
Her sense of writing exists on a lofty plain—far from self-serving thoughts or motivations. Of course, this is a difficult program, and Pritchard is honest about this struggle.
Mot: A Memoir
Perhaps more than any other genre, memoir relies upon empathy. The memoir writer invites us to enter her world and inhabit her perspective. Our ability to do so largely determines our understanding of the memoir and our satisfaction upon reading it. Sarah Einstein’s Mot is remarkable in that it enacts memoir. Einstein invites us to enter her world as she enters the world of a homeless man named Mot.
A Different Kind of Same
The book is honest, brave, and soul-baring in its exploration of grief and clinical depression.
Home at the Heart
After twenty years of living as an expatriate in the United States, my German husband, Stefan, announced he wanted to go home. And by home he meant the village where he’d grown up, a hamlet of two hundred households tucked into the northwestern edge of the Black Forest, a slice of southern Germany with undulating […]
Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life
Colin Ellard’s wide-ranging and absorbing book is both an exploration of how human beings currently use physical spaces, and how space and place may be transformed by technology in the future. Ellard observes that we hardly notice the places we inhabit unless they are beautiful or dreary, but between these two poles are vast […]
Ongoingness: The End of a Diary
Manguso wisely trains her attention on what persists, claiming space in art for motherhood and reminding us that it hasn’t all been said before—not like this.
Namesake
Image by James Morley Listen to our podcast of this essay here. When I told my uncle Mason that I was gay, my father was back at the house, getting drunk. Earlier that evening I had come out to my parents, and my father didn’t take it well. I knew he wouldn’t, so I […]
The Argonauts
Although The Arnogauts is listed on several suggested summer reads lists, it should not at all be mistaken for a light read.