Literature Archives - Page 7 of 12

Literature

Matters of Offense

A PEN America World Voices Festival conversation on free speech, appropriation, and what it takes to be an artist

September 5, 2023 • by Ayad Akhtar and Eboo Patel

In an intimate dialogue, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, novelist, and President of PEN America Ayad Akhtar (Homeland Elegies) and Interfaith America Founder and President Eboo Patel (We Need to Build) explore the climate of self-censorship facing writers, question whether marginalization is a useful category in art, and discuss the dangers of ...

Gender

Eau du Easy Mark

An excerpt from Lucky Dogs: A Novel

June 8, 2023 • by Helen Schulman

My natural scent could be called “eau du easy mark,” an odor only vermin can detect, a spicy mélange of paralysis perfume with prior-history-of-abuse essence....

Literature

Year of the Rat

An excerpt from Marc Anthony Richardson’s experimental novel

April 5, 2023 • by Marc Anthony Richardson

... it had a semi-prehensile tail that nearly snaked a forearm like an opossum’s or a cat’s, but it was a gargantuan rat’s ......

Art & Design

Poetic Rage, Anti-colonial Avant-gardes

An excerpt of Interior Frontiers

March 7, 2023 • by Ann Stoler

This essay distills what I see as a fugitive, peripatetic set of counter-colonial avant-gardes, innovative and mobile to different degrees, challenging both what avant-gardes do and who are included among them. I do not treat them as a movement but as convergent spaces of work and thought, of “counter-conducts,” of ...

Literature

Bard, Kinetic

An excerpt from the preface of Anne Waldman’s new nonfiction book

January 25, 2023 • by Anne Waldman

Poetry has always braved shifting and terrifying frequencies. There is no time in human history without poetry. Poets often go into exile in fraught times....

Literature

Introducing the Latest Issue of James Baldwin Review

Honoring Baldwin’s legacy in a new volume of academic research, criticism, and personal essays

October 3, 2022 • by Justin A. Joyce

As we continue to bring together a mixture of scholarship, reviews, and reflections—from a variety of voices—it is our humble aim to continue to grow our readership and expand the legacy and impact of our namesake author’s moving works and searing insights. ...

Introducing the Latest Issue of James Baldwin Review

Literature

Excerpt from “A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats: Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects”

“Hers is the story, if ever there was one, of a great American”

September 7, 2022 • by Dwight A. McBride

The story of Poems on Various Subjects, like the story of its author, the slave girl named after the ship that brought her across the Atlantic, is a story that should both inspire and enrage. ...

Excerpt from “A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats: Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects”

Art & Design

Souvenir

Adapted excerpt from Activities of Daily Living

April 13, 2022 • by Lisa Hsiao Chen

For her project about the Artist—at least that’s what she was calling it for now, a project—Alice read all that she could find about his yearlong performance works before he renounced making art altogether. There was the year he locked himself in a cage. The year he punched a time clock ...

Literature

Boris Pasternak in Spring

A translation of the poet’s very early work

March 18, 2022 • by Inessa Medzhibovskaya

Boris Pasternak, a Jew by birth, chose to remain in Soviet Russia when the rest of his family, his famous father, painter and portraitist Leonid Pasternak including, had left, never to return....

Literature

Decolonizing Daniel Defoe

How Black lives matter in A Journal of the Plague Year

February 9, 2022 • by Anna Neill

It isn’t hard to see why A Journal of the Plague Year has enjoyed renewed attention in recent times. But to invoke it without considering Defoe’s support for British imperialism and the expanding Atlantic slave trade is to make literary history complicit with colonial and racial injustice....

Literature

Literary Imperialism and Scenes of High Melodrama

When BIPOC and queer writers defy minimalism

February 1, 2022 • by Torsa Ghosal

The term melodrama is a value judgment—and as such, it can be careless. ...

Literary Imperialism and Scenes of High Melodrama

Literature

The Eleventh Mouse

A writer welcomes the unexpected at end of an old year and the start of a new one

January 3, 2022 • by Maureen Buchanan Jones

Here I was caring for another creature with more than a bit of martyrdom and annoyance in my heart. I had forgotten my self-administered advice as an antidote to despair that “something extraordinary is going to happen today.”...