Thorpe, a longtime BBC correspondent, crafts precise, evocative prose and has a reporter’s gift for what makes a story. He makes the uncommon choice to trek upstream, against the flow of both the Danube and most other accounts of it, letting readers share the sense of drama Thorpe himself clearly feels.
Whichever way you read this collection, the true nature of the writing, and the story, is deeply and profoundly imaginative.
It happened so quickly I couldn’t remember my other life, the life of the well, that ordinary wake-up-in-the-morning-have-a-cup-of-coffee-and-get-on-with-it self. One day I had a routine: I’d write for an hour each morning at the kitchen table, go to work at nine, come home at six, fix dinner with David, and then read or write until […]
“I was afraid to write about my female poetry mentors and was deeply afraid to write about my mother,” Rachel Zucker admits in the Acknowledgements of MOTHERs, “So I began.” Taking her own dares is common practice for Zucker, the author of seven books, most recently, The Pedestrians and Home/Birth: a poemic, co-written with Arielle Greenberg.
photograph by Wayne Stadler General Objective: To provide the students with an opportunity to study the skeletons of numerous animals they find in the ecosystem. Background Information: It is quite common for biologists studying wildlife populations to examine skeletal fragments to determine aspects of a species’ natural history . . . In order to learn […]
“When you’re not in perfect balance,” Floyd Skloot writes in the introduction to Revertigo: An Off-Kilter Memoir, “everything familiar is transformed. There’s a destabilizing of the self and its encounter with the world, a whirling of space and time.”
In these smart and engaging essays, Shinner challenges us to reconsider our bodies—in particular women’s bodies, in particular Jewish bodies—but her point is more general, too. Our existence is intricately linked to our ongoing physical health.
Renfro’s essays are profoundly moving, written in a rich, deeply felt voice touched with wistfulness and melancholy that resists sentimentality and is unafraid of the violence that is a significant characteristic of both life and death.
Listen to our podcast of this essay here. Heading west out of Kalispell, US-2 passes a Smith’s grocery store, some mom and pop casinos, and billboards in the yards of half-built homes before the land opens into wide fields. They are spring flooded: fence posts planted in water, horses and cattle relegated to the […]
Some events are so vast and complicated as to render them ultimately unknowable.