“It’s the Language, Stupid.”
Matthew Zapruder discusses the role of language and meaning in poetry and his book of criticism, Why Poetry. {listen}
Writing in Someone Else’s World
I stumbled on a high-pay, low-prestige way to enter the publishing world—and overcame my reservations to make the most of the opportunity. My first book was not what I dreamed…
The Poetry of Everyday Life
How we use poetry to find meaning and to bring disparate aspects of life together. {listen}
How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ
The cover of How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ is an eye-catcher. The lines of red text are a hard hook: “She didn’t write it. She wrote it…
Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to “Make America Great Again”
By Abby Aguirre July 26, 2017 Octavia Butler’s tenth novel, “Parable of the Sower,” which was published in 1993, opens in Los Angeles in 2024. Global warming has brought drought…
The Divine Within: Aldous Huxley on Mind-Body Integration and How We Become Who We Are
Aldous Huxley (July 26, 1894–November 22, 1963) endures as one of the most visionary and unusual minds of the twentieth century — a man of strong convictions about drugs, democracy,…
Artist Uses 100,000 Banned Books To Build A Full-Size Parthenon At Historic Nazi Book Burning Site
“Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people,” Heinrich Heine said in the 19th century.
How to Recognize a Dystopia: Watch an Animated Introduction to Dystopian Fiction
Literature and film can open up to the depth and immensity of social truths we find profoundly difficult, if not impossible, to articulate. If our political vocabulary (as Oxford Dictionaries…
Are witches the ultimate feminists?
Sollee’s book positions itself as a whirlwind history of the witch in America and her shared history with sexually liberated women and radical liberationary politics. It’s a bite-sized grimoire than…
Born This Gay
At the turn of the 20th century, a German doctor sets out to prove that homosexuality is rooted in biology—but his research has consequences he never intended. In pre-Nazi Germany,…