Section
Literary Fiction
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Beautiful Sentences Matter: Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley
“Queer theory in general spoke to me in an embodied way, beyond its important theoretical work, because it revealed for me that beautiful sentences matter and that they can be critical aspects of the reading experience.”
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Gatsby @ 100: American Classrooms, American Dreams?
The story of Gatsby, Nick, Tom, and Daisy is also, much more importantly, part of the history of hundreds of millions of student readers and their teachers, spanning eight decades.
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Wings, Angels, Tentacles: Talking with Siddhartha Deb
“What lies outside the weird—the subconscious, our dreams, our fantasies, the monster, the alien—these are possible sources of liberation.”
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Novels are Like Elephants: Ken Liu and Rose Casey
“All fictional works are in some sense defined by the moment they were written and what their authors were trying to experience.”
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Novel Dialogue Season 9 Trailer: Writing Against the System with Aarthi Vadde
In the trailer for Season 9 of Novel Dialogue, Aarthi Vadde looks at the web as the predominant platform of cultural life, and one that needs to be understood in light of literary history.
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Autofiction Writers of the World, Unite!
Immediacy, here, is an aesthetics of ambivalent aspiration, within a hierarchically ordered and immobilizing class- and race-based cultural system.
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“Who Made These Rules?”: Claire Messud on What’s Distracting from Good Writing
“I believe in the amazing complexities of what we can express and convey in language if people will only make the effort and take the time.”
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Beyond the Doom Loop of High Theory
If paradox can be toxic, what’s the antidote?
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Archives of the Surveilled
Arthur Huff Fauset’s elision from literary history was not merely a scholarly oversight but a reality constructed in advance by powerful forces.
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Our Last Supper
“The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild” is a novel that insists on the limits of what fiction can do. Its happy ending, the reader realizes, is no happy ending at all.
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“I Love a Dialectical Reader, and Best Is a Dialectical Reader Who Cries”: Jordy Rosenberg and Annie McClanahan
“I really just wanted to write a novel—I guess to me, this feels very queer—but a novel that was about tenderness and militancy.”
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Proust Curious: Beyond the “Recherche”
À la recherche du temps perdu has its place in literary culture partly because it has influenced generations of writers.
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Proust Curious: “Time Regained“
“Certainly, if only our hearts were in question, the poet was right when he spoke of the mysterious threads which life breaks. But it is still truer that life is ceaselessly weaving them between beings.”
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And Soon: Lydia Millet and Emily Hyde
“The longer I’m alive, the more convinced I become that human exceptionalism is our original sin.”
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All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti
“I had an innate sense as a child that the war was a deep part of who my parents were, so tied up in how they told stories and how they understood reality and existed in the world.”
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The Poetics of Democracy: A Conversation with Devika Rege
“This novel is about a collective, but that collective is not the nation. It can only allude to the nation without becoming it.”
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Toward a New Abuelita Canon
The new abuelita canon is giving a sense of interiority to the lived and unlived lives of our abuelas.
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Drawn Together, Held Apart: Cristina Henríquez’s “The Great Divide”
Cristina Henríquez’s novel is the product of extensive historical research. It also comes amid a boom in scholarship on and depictions of Panama and the canal.
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Proust Curious: “The Captive“
“The possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself.”
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Aspire to Magic but End Up with Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs Speaks with Sunny Yudkoff
“I’m aiming for something emotional, psychological, but I want it as an emergent property.”
