The thing about a soap opera is that it reliably presses certain buttons. Someone onscreen goes through an outrageous, exaggerated version of events so that you can release feelings of your own subtler, realer experience.
Review: Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis
Axiom’s End sci-fi grapples with timely questions about our civilization while its hero grapples with aliens.
Between Screens: A Tent Of One’s Own
I feel like a child in an empty box. The walls are daydreams, and the world is anything.
Review: Want by Lynn Steger Strong
Review: Want by Lynn Steger Strong “‘You tired, runner girl?’ They all call me runner girl,” confesses the narrator in the opening of Lynn Steger Strong’s second novel, Want. Having lived a former life as a competitive distance runner, this…
Review: Clerk of the Dead by Alan Perry
Alan Perry’s poems do not only reckon with death or dying; they reckon with what it means to lose something.
Review: Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier
A mixture of Juno meets Miranda July’s The First Bad Man meets something new entirely, Frazier’s book explores themes of female intimacy, queerness, addiction, motherhood, and how quickly anything can escalate.
Incantations for Unsung Boys
The most powerful magic often remains invisible, except to those who know how to recognize it. The act of gendering is also an incantation, an act of naming.
Review: Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey
Trethewey’s memoir is a lyric confrontation with grief—the way it shapes and reshapes memory over time, permeating even those decades preceding loss.
Review: Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh
Mackintosh examines the nature of rebellion, the innate strength of motherhood, and the paradox of choice.
Between Screens: My Bathroom Desk
I didn’t choose the bathroom for its grandeur. The room is narrow and yellowed with a bathtub against the wall and cobwebbed windows above the toilet and sink.
Crisis, Struggle, Counter-Revolution: A Brief Guide to Racial Capitalism in the U.S.
It may seem strange, when thinking of the future, to recommend books on the past, but studying history is not simply about picking apart old news.
Between Screens: Ficus Elastica
Our plant is the closest thing I have to a little brother, disregarding some of my mother’s oldest plates and mugs. It is stocky and broad, it throws its dark leaves and branches as far horizontally as it does vertically.