Posts by: Sybil Baker

Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash

Escapes; or, the Easiest Terrain

“We prided ourselves in not being like other Westerners.”

The radical re-visioning of Anna Kavan

I first read Helen Ferguson/Anna Kavan in 1997 or 1998 when I was living in Ansan, an industrial city an hour subway ride from Seoul. Every few months I’d receive…

Reverse Migration

After our month-long travels across southeastern Europe, Rowan and I arrived at my brother and sister-in-law’s apartment in Ankara ready for a home-cooked meal. We were (over) fed in typical…

Missing the Mark: Nell Zink’s Racial Fluidity

When Jess Row’s “White Flights” was published in Boston Review in 2013, nobody in the American literary world, except perhaps Jonathan Franzen, had heard of Nell Zink, an American writer…

The History of the Wanderer

When I was four my family moved from our modest ranch house in Florissant, Missouri, to a larger two story home on an acre of land in Fairfax, Virginia. This…