The figs you eat have the bodies of the dead who tried to enter those to whom they are the same rather than those to whom they are different—Leviticus tells us such things are an “abomination,” and this fruit is your caution as it is your knowledge.
In Southeast Asian film and culture, the pontianak has grown ubiquitous as an undead woman, cursed with immense beauty and monstrosity. This icon is at the center of Sharlene Teo’s Ponti, a novel that chronicles the lives of three misfit women.
If I’m the god of my characters, I hope I’m a flexible one.
For García Márquez, anecdotes always served as kernels of truth, experiences both whittled down to their most elemental and novelistic tales in need of being fleshed out.
The general proximity of Alex Israel’s SPF-18
The Bridge, The Pyramid and The Spire
Parable as architecture; construction as crime
Instead of writing about a heyday of a culture or a scene or a place, I wanted to land in the aftermath. I wanted to see what was going on those doldrums.
Democracy, Nature, Manifest Destiny
What makes Crane’s modernist epic so instructive for the twenty-first century is how it discovers ample room in nature for humanity’s freedom struggle.
A dialectical reflection on graduate education, and God
I knew that I was going to talk about abuse, I wanted to leave it on the page, action by action, without much reflection.