Here’s the problem with mental illness: what we know about it is far surpassed by what we don’t. This, of course, should be unsurprising. After all, the human brain remains one of the most complex things in the known universe. We’ve figured out black holes, developed vaccines for novel coronaviruses in unprecedented record time, and […]
Can you think of a place you would never go back to, if you had the choice? Can you think of a place you could never go back to—a place where you are no longer welcome? In her book-length lyric essay There Was Nothing Left But Gold, estranged from her family and recently disowned by […]
In Blackspace, Anaïs Duplan explores the nature of sociocultural liberation through prose, interview, and poetic settings. This meditation roams from a singular to a collective experience. His writing is underpinned with the question of how to achieve Black liberation not only through political movement, but through artistic endeavors: music, film, theater, poetry. This book reckons […]
As Ronald Johnson offers us in his germinal epic, ARK: Beneath a maze pattern on a wall of the church of St. Savino, in Piacenza, the inscription reads: THIS LABYRINTH REVEALS THE STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD. Convoluted of sun and dust, shut dark in a skull, the labyrinth is its own clue. Our lot is […]
Photograph by Edwin Chen When and why did I first start doing all in my power to avoid being inside an elevator? Maybe things felt overcrowded in the womb, with my twin in there too, or I got into a tight spot as a toddler and people took a while to notice. In my grander […]
Diane Johnson opens her breakthrough biography, The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, with a challenge to the reader as to why we don’t know about her subject: Many People have described the Famous Writer presiding at his dinner table . . . everybody remembers his remarks. . . . […]
What would you do if you were sixteen and lost most of your eyesight? If, within weeks, you could no longer drive, read the high school blackboard, pick out the coolest music, or recognize your date’s face? Would you consider your options? Or would you fall into a pattern without making any conscious decision at […]
In a recent interview on the NPR show Fresh Air, a ninety-five-year-old Mel Brooks told Terry Gross that while he didn’t know what the meaning of life was, he did know that comedy was his “delicious refuge from the world.” Gross quotes from Brooks’s new memoir, in which he writes: “Even though it seems foolish […]
There is something quite private about annotating a book. Without thought to publication, writing in the margins is an act of confidence; there is the possibility of glibness, or pretention, or completely banal questions that we wouldn’t typically offer up in public. We are able to argue with every page of Plato, if we so […]
Daniel Sherrell’s epistolary climate memoir, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, begins with an act of self-immolation. We learn that in 2018 a man named David Buckel set himself on fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, stating in his suicide letter that his was “an early death by fossil fuel.” In relaying […]