On Fiction
The Novel is dead, long live the novel
Novelists announce the death of the novel with such sinister regularity you’d be forgiven for thinking they can’t wait to find themselves out of a job. It’s a cyclical theme,…
Re-inhabiting culture, transforming the self: R.K. Narayan’s The Guide
In R. K. Narayan’s novel The Guide (1958) a common con-man, “Railway” Raju, asks for a few choice morsels under the guise of a religious requirement. He’s begging from the…
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…
Sam Shepard is a place
Ed note: Sam Shepard passed away on July 27, 2017. He was alive at the time this essay was written. Sam Shepard is a place, and in The One Inside…
Infinitely Weird Flights of Mind: Jeremy Bushnell’s The Insides
Our senses discern four dimensions, three spatial and one temporal. Quantum physics notably augmented this self-evidence with anywhere from six to an infinite number of unobservable dimensions. So where are…
From the Editors: the Motherhood Issue
We’re trying to think back to the origins of A. Bradstreet: We remember that I was working in the Poetry Room at Harvard. That I came by to drop off…
Love Behind Locked Doors: Phyllis Bottome in the Age of Trump
In January 1933, German President von Hindenburg offered the position of Chancellor to Adolf Hitler after his Nazi Party captured a majority of seats in the German Reichstag. In the…
Greater Boston Writers Resist
Jan 16, 2017 | Hundreds of Greater Boston residents convened at the Boston Public Library yesterday for a demonstration of shared commitment to the rights and values essential to a democracy….
Introducing Zhongshi Chen’s Modern Classic, White Deer Plain
The Dream of the Red Chamber, one of China’s four great classical novels, written in the middle of the eighteenth century by Cao Xueqin, records the decline and fall of…