Essays

Exterior Lives

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Ranging in scale from tiny projects by one-man development teams to titles with million-dollar production budgets, video games seem much more eager than the literary establishment to borrow and learn from other forms.

Off the Road with Ted Rees

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Vagabondage, thrill-seeking, and risk underwrite the best of these poems—and knowledge of Rees’s adventures only makes the best of his work resonate more strongly.

Lucky Over There: Meeting the Greek Translator of Breece D’J Pancake

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Perhaps, without realizing it, a part of me had begun to wish Pancake’s fame had never grown beyond the depths of the library where I found him, to wish his brutal brilliance was a secret known only within the state borders.

The Insidious Faux-Feminism of Barbie

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It wasn’t until Barbie left Barbie Land that the proverbial needle skipped for me. I didn’t watch the Barbie Movie expecting a feminist film. I never imagined the need to critique it as such. But the Barbie Movie has proclaimed itself a feminist film, and so must be critiqued in this light.

“Keep the Dream”: Science Fiction and the Desanctification of Space

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When it comes to the most expensive business in—and beyond—the world . . . no one ever seems to ask the cheapest of questions: Is it worth it?

In Praise of the Goblin

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The goblin arrives through people, not in front of them. More poltergeist than monster. We can’t know its specific form, but we see it appear—fluidly, over and over again—in what we fear, and where that fear ignites into inspiration.

Whom To Send To: Bernadette Mayer’s Lifelong Epistle

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The letter resembles such gestures as the smile or the wave in the way it puts faith in the signs we move between each other as subjects.

Art as Savior: Against Nature

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I wanted salvation without the fall; I wanted art to save me from life.

Maria Messina’s Feminine Flaw

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Messina’s writing is bleak and tender and honest and is not trying to persuade me of anything, least of all that things will work out.

“Within Spitting Distance of the Exit”

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Some people will go to the ends of the earth for closure, while others maintain until their last, hypertensive breath that it doesn’t exist.