Essays
August 22, 2011
No Place Like Home 5
by Sonya Chung
At the risk of stating the obvious: isn’t it strange, I mean, this thing about being a human being breathing and thinking and sensing and dwelling always, always, in a place?
August 18, 2011
Making Room for Readers 38
by Steve Himmer
It’s a mistake to rarify reading and put books out of reach. It’s a mistake to assume that readers are “mostly born and only a little made.” Because those discoveries in libraries and bookstores — and, yes, on my parents’ shelves, too — are what made me a reader, not some mysterious, bibliogenic accident of birth.
August 10, 2011
Anniversaries, Anesthesia, and Elizabeth Bishop 10
by Magdalena Edwards
The fixating on being “now exactly at the age” or moment when the anniversary of a terrible thing that happened or didn’t happen that Elizabeth Bishop describes, I know this. The same week I received my copies of the new Bishop volumes edited by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, I took my three-year-old son to the emergency room.
August 3, 2011
Why Do We Care About Literary Awards? 15
by Mark O'Connell
Getting worked up about the fact that really interesting, innovative fiction so often gets ignored by awards judges is, when you think about it, a little bit absurd.
August 2, 2011
Why Rent? On Our Lost Pursuit of Property 5
by Joyce Hinnefeld
We can try to keep realizing westward, but unfortunately, some things are simply finite. Would that the ownership of property — of land, of moving water — were as simple as what “Why Rent?” ads or political rhetoric about home ownership imply.
July 29, 2011
Following the Moon: Plot and the Novels of Tana French 8
by Edan Lepucki
Beyond the world of storytelling, plot is defined as a secret scheme to reach a specific end. Or it’s a parcel of land. Or it means to mark a graph, chart, or map: the plotting shows us what has changed; our ship is headed this way. To a writer (me) interested in (obsessed with?) plot-making, all of these are significant definitions.
