Literature

Sunrise over Lake Baikal / Photo by Arseniy Chekmarev / Flickr My name is Iaromira Forgive me if I speak of sad thingsWhen my footsteps echo in my bones A silence saved me from the wordAnother silence will save the word And the wind shall be my home                                     * I saw the stars swim
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Disaster is everywhere. In our movies, our television shows, our books, and, of course, on our news channels. Given the many crises plaguing our modern age—from climate change to a deadly airborne virus, the erosion of democracy to NFTs—it is no wonder that dystopic storytelling rules the day. Apocalypse is now.   There is another reason,
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​​Black horror has come of age. It began as oral tales Black folks would tell each other to pass down cultural warnings and taboos during enslavement and post-Emancipation. In its pubescence, the genre unfurled and infiltrated the written word, as seen in Charles W. Chessnutt’s The Conjure Woman in 1899; and invaded Hollywood only a
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When I first read “Girl”—Jamaica Kincaid’s well-anthologized short story featuring a mother instructing her young daughter how to behave and carry herself—I heard my own mother’s voice saying, “If you can’t cook, your husband will send you back, you know.” My mother said it from time to time, exhorting the young girls in her care—her
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The Day She Ditched Them at the Beach Brendan Mathews Brendan Mathews is the author of the novel The World of Tomorrow and the short story collection This Is Not a Love Song. Share article Maniacs The cousins are supposed to spend the day at the lake. Summer vacation, 1980, and the radio is saying
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Photo by Pierre Châtel-Innocenti / Unsplash In Winter Lights, rising star Irati Elorrieta’s first novel, Añes is a Basque woman who has immigrated to Berlin by way of Paris. Her story explores the contradictions of pulling up roots and embarking on a new life: melancholy and freedom, detachment and memory, alienation and independence. The following
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A new book by a Nobel laureate and Booker award-winning author always brings with it a sense of trepidation. Will the new novel live up to the already established high expectations? Klara and the Sun (Knopf, 2021) is particularly tricky because it revisits questions about life in posthuman futures, explored partly in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never
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