Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa
We know the stories, or we think we do. The Sixties.
White Girls
Als challenges not just conventional views of literature but the very approach.
Throwing Doves
In a noisy city teahouse due west of the Appalachian Plateau, I sat sipping hot rooibos and spying on a lop-eared man sleeping on the sidewalk.
Hour Thirteen
I had this thought upon learning that my fifth-grade math teacher was applying to be the first teacher in space: The space shuttle will explode.
I didn’t know what to do with this thought because it was so confident and so future tense and so informative. But was it really information? I was an imaginative girl and what the adults would say I already knew. Every time my family flew, I quelled a cousin demon: The plane will crash. Foolish, anxious me, never in a plane crash. So I dismissed the worry and by January 28, 1986, had even forgotten it until my reading teacher was called to the office just past noon.
The Perpetual Motion Machine
By definition a great work of art is one that establishes and lives by its own credentials. Until it invents its own category, it resists classification…. now Scheerbart’s little book can be added to this select list.
Innocent Eye: A Passionate Look at Contemporary Art
As an artist and art critic, Patricia Rosoff knows that audiences often feel stymied by contemporary art that seems to them ugly, unskilled, inaccessible, or gimmicky. “I hope by this book,” Rosoff writes, “to loan you my eyes and my empathy, professional and personal, as I bring you with me through the galleries and museums […]
Animal, Mineral, Radical: A Flock of Essays on Wildlife, Family & Food
BK Loren is a thinking person. She observes the universe with a keen eye and returns it to us improved for her efforts. She strikes a winning balance between the particular details of her own life’s travails, her interpretations of these events, and her macro-level observations about the natural world. In her third book, an […]
Meaty
Relationships may crumble, the electricity may be shut off, jobs may grind us, our bodies may betray us, and bitches may be bitches, but Meaty shows us a way of being in the world that argues wisdom and self-acceptance are monuments built of endurance and perseverance.
Chasing Gideon: The Elusive Quest for Poor People’s Justice
“Like many Americans, neither Sean nor his family had given much thought to ‘public defenders’ or ‘indigent defense.’… Legal services for the poor and the working class was not an issue for them. Why would it be? They had never been in trouble with the law.” That is, until eighteen-year-old Sean Replogle, within a week […]
Surfacing
The neighborhood where I lived during my teenage years had a community swimming pool. It was small but clean: an aqua rectangle surrounded by pebbled cement, with a cobwebbed bathroom and a splintered picnic table, a rise of trees on one side of the wrought iron fence and a slope of grass on the other. […]