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Sharon Olds and Rachel B. Glaser on Reality TV
Texas Lane, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Over the past few years, Korean reality TV has been a source of inspiration for my writing. Reading the subtitles is an amazing lesson in dialogue. The...
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On Friendship: Juliana Leite and Devon Geyelin Recommend
Friendship bracelets, Ra’ike, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. I’m interested in stories that gently erase the boundaries between love and friendship, featuring characters who shuffle the two...
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Alejo Carpentier’s Second Language
Alejo Carpentier, 1979. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I like to think of literature as a second language—especially the second language of the monolingual. I’m thinking, naturally, about those...
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Apparently Personal: On Sharon Olds
Sharon Olds at left, with a GIrl Scout camp friend at Lake Tahoe, California, ca. 1956. Courtesy of Sharon Olds. Who is Sharon Olds? Sharon Olds is an American poet, born in San Francisco in 1942. She...
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Sentences We Loved This Summer
Bonner Springs City Library, Bonner Springs, Kentucky, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0, A passage about LA (“ellay”) from Henry Hoke’s Open Throat, a novel narrated by a mountain lion:...
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The Paris Review’s Favorite Books of 2023
Henry Taylor, UNTITLED, 2010. From Untitled Portfolio, issue no. 243. © HENRY TAYLOR, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND HAUSER AND WIRTH. PHOTOGRAPHS BY MAKENZIE GOODMAN. Book that made me cry on the subway:...
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Qishu: Han Song’s Hospital Nightmares
Digital artwork of a science-fictional surgery room by alan9187, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Hospitals play a big role in Yu Hua’s life and fiction—his parents were both doctors, he grew up in and...
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The Frenchwoman from Indianapolis
Janet Flanner, ca. 1925. Berenice Abbott, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Here is Norman Mailer in his fine black boots, high-cut and shiny and very snug on the ankle, like something you might...
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Ananda Devi and Callie Siskel Recommend
John William Waterhouse, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. When I read Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, a novel about an interpreter at the International Court of Justice, I found myself underlining...
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Prince and the Afterworld: Dorothea Lasky and Tony Tulathimutte Recommend
Photograph by Allen Beaulieu, distributed by Warner Bros. Records. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the afterlife and if it’s real. It’s always been hard for...
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