Censoring Power: Nollywood, Politics, and the Price of Creative Freedom
What appears local in Nigeria such as insurgent violence, political corruption, and institutional critique is, in this light, part of a familiar pattern: states using censorship or regulatory pressure to guide narratives, control moral perception, and shape collective memory.
“Homicide: Life on the Street” and the Perverse Pleasures of Copaganda
How do we come to terms with the undeniable pleasures of this blatantly ideological genre?
Traumatic Brain Novel: Debut Fiction from Esinam Bediako and Stacy Nathaniel Jackson
There’s a temptation, when we talk about illness and disability in fiction, to treat the body as either a tragic backstory or an inspirational obstacle course. These novels do something else.
Printing Out the Internet: On Madeline Cash’s “Lost Lambs”
As our attention spans dwindle and our phones loom over our everyday experiences, we are increasingly demanding that novels capture our attention in the same way.
Hearts, Chainsaws, and Poetry: On Elizabeth R. McClellan’s “Is My Chainsaw a Heart: 13 Centos”
Who keeps us safe all those nights? We do, by the stories we tell and the stories we cut apart, with chainsaws and with hearts.
Resurrecting the Dead in Confessional True Crime Memoirs
In both memoirs, evidence serves less to solve a crime than to reconstruct a self—both the dead family member and the writer grappling with their loss.
Boring Starvation: On Finding the Eating Disorder Book I Needed
For a while . . . I thought that no one should write about eating disorders at all because there was no way to do so without somehow glamorizing them.
It would be tempting, if you were a theoretical physicist working on the first atomic bomb, to imagine yourself as a demiurge. To frame the process as spiritual longing for God’s wrath . . .
The Women We Inherit: Ayodele Olofintuade’s ‘Swallow’ and the Reclamation of Queer Histories
Our history is in the bodies they tried to straighten, the stories they would not write, the lives they refused to archive.
Elegy Already: Millennials at Middle Age
We were kids together. And now we are not.