Little Pink Book as Literary Fanfiction
Traditionally, Western concepts of originality in art are not equipped to consider whether creativity is possible under conditions of continual reproduction; it presupposes an authentic source of spontaneous genius.
“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?
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.
Mouthing Off: Oral History as an Anticapitalist Form
An oral history is a unique form of nonfiction where, from the beginning, we are given no promise of truth and the editors make no claims toward a clear, ideologically-specific thesis about their subjects.