The prolific French novelist and memoirist Annie Ernaux opens Simple Passion—a slim autobiographical novel narrating her passionate and doomed affair with a married Russian diplomat temporarily stationed in Paris—with a description of her protagonist watching pornography. She searches at first for a comprehensible narrative to the film, some evidence of causality to the actions being […]
Self-Storage Photo By Joel Swick [The Bowl that Fills] I can’t conjure my own first memory, but I do remember Virginia Woolf’s. She was in the nursery at St. Ives in the Hebrides. The acorn on the end of the string from a window blind slid back and forth across the floor with the […]
In Possums Run Amok, teenager Lora Lafayette hitchhikes to destinations unknown, striving to quench her thirst to explore the unknown. Eventually she and her friend Kay journey across the ocean from their hometown of Portland, Oregon to experience European cultures whilst embracing an edgy, punk-rock, anarchist lifestyle during the late 1970s. In this “true tale […]
A Latin phrase is included in the Great Seal of the United States: “E pluribus unum,” meaning, “Out of many, one.” This is etched into the fabric of the American story. In Poet Warrior: A Memoir, Native Nations’ first United States Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, indeed makes out of many, one. In her second memoir, […]
In 2006, Donald Antrim was on the roof of his apartment building, close to suicide. “I was not on the roof to jump,” he clarifies, “I was there to die, but dying was not a plan. . . I did not want to die, only felt that I would, or should, or must, and I […]
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 […]