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.
Phoning Home: Essays, Einstein’s Beach House: Stories, and Scouting for the Reaper: Stories
Jacob Appel has been very, very busy. In his early forties, Appel is a lawyer. And a doctor. And a medical ethicist. And, oh yes, according to his author bio, he’s also published more than two hundred stories, collecting numerous writerly awards and accolades along the way. In the last three years alone, he’s released six books: four story collections, a book of essays, a mystery novel, and a literary novel.
A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic
The impulse to create and solve puzzles is embedded within us, as is a yearning to go beyond the puzzle—which can be solved—to some deeper mystery—which cannot. The tension between these concepts—puzzle and mystery—forms the center of Turchi’s learned, funny, and uncategorizable book, part writing guide, part literary criticism, and part playful compendium of tricks, games, and problems.
All Who Go Do Not Return
His memoir reflects this attitude of honest examination. His life is marked by dizzying transformation, yet Deen’s solid prose acts as a steady rudder, moving swiftly and cleanly through a series of calamities and fluctuations.
The Danube: A Journey Upriver from the Black Sea to the Black Forest
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.
I Was Not Born
Whichever way you read this collection, the true nature of the writing, and the story, is deeply and profoundly imaginative.
The Lost Years
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 […]
MOTHERs
“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.