When Is It Time to Leave?

In her new novel, Overstaying, Ariane Koch plays with the comforts of home

The places we’ve lived are sites of memory, places we can revisit time and again without using a door. I’ve often gone back and visited the home I grew up in, though I haven’t set foot inside since my family left it three decades ago. Instead, I can feel the ...
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When Is It Time to Leave?

The Powerful Convergence of Past, Present, and Future in Catherine Texier’s Latest Novel

An interview about After David

An older woman and a younger man—a trope that operates on elements of fantasy and plays with conventional expectations. The dynamic between an older woman and a younger man is complex; it's looked down upon, and it never gets tiresome. In After David (ITNA Press, 2024), Catherine Texier explores these themes ...
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The Powerful Convergence of Past, Present, and Future in Catherine Texier’s Latest Novel

The Blessings of K-Pop

What could be more divine than a real human who inspires and comforts without ever having to meet you?

As a child, I engaged in religious rituals out of obligation. Over time, the black thread tied around my ankle came off, the excitement of choosing a clay Ganesh and decorating its shrine slowly dulled, the prayers that I had spent hundreds of hours memorizing evaporated from my memory, and ...
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The Blessings of K-Pop

The Witches of El Paso

An excerpt from a new novel on the supernatural power of family

On the bridge to Juárez, Marta peers down at the Rio Grande trickling along its concrete ditch. The air is heavy with diesel exhaust. People walk across the bridge carrying bright blue and red plastic bags, pushing granny carts toward El Paso. Marta thinks back to when she was a girl, ...
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The Witches of El Paso

The Fashion for Baiting, Brainwashing, and Bullying

How does Brandy Melville continue to tap into the most desperate impulses of being a teenage girl?

“From the beginning of the supply chain to the end, we’re all being exploited by the same system” says Chloe Asaam, who represents the Or Foundation. She’s speaking in Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion, an HBO documentary that explores the toxicity of the international brand Brandy Melville.  The ...
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The Fashion for Baiting, Brainwashing, and Bullying

A Termination

An excerpt from A Termination by Honor Moore: a memoir about choice, loss, and identity

He bends to look in.It comes to me now that right then, the gynecologist asks again if I want to do this, and I say yes. Did you waver? asks a voice in my head. I want to say no, and that is correct. I did not waver.Are you sure?Yes. ...
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A Termination

Her Choice

Honor Moore discusses the decision that shaped her life as a woman and a writer

In 1969, Honor Moore was a 23-year-old graduate student at Yale School of Drama when she made the profound decision to end an unintended pregnancy—an experience that would shape her life and work. In her memoir A Termination (Public Space Books), Moore reflects on this pivotal moment while embarking on ...
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Her Choice

Misanthropy Is Having a Moment

A self-help guide for pessimists

If you or someone you know is experiencing symptoms of a negative outlook on humanity, then David E. Cooper’s Pessimism, Quietism, and Nature as Refuge (Agenda Publishing, 2024) might be just the book for you.  Cooper’s “negative judgement on the moral and spiritual failings of humankind” focuses readers’ attention on our ...
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Misanthropy Is Having a Moment

A Monk Without a Monastery

The paradigm shift of a single shot in Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days

In the last shot of Perfect Days, this year’s Oscar-nominated masterpiece by Wim Wenders, a middle-aged Tokyoite named Hirayama drives through his city under a honey-colored sunrise. By this point in the film, we know it’s a habit for him to play a cassette in his ancient van’s tape deck ...
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A Monk Without a Monastery

Where the Avant-Garde Went to Grow

Behind the scenes of Becoming Bohemia: Greenwich Village, 1912–1923

We have really rich, deep collections of materials related to Greenwich Village, especially dealing with this period of the Village's history. When the wider public thinks of Bohemias or avant-garde settings, especially from that time period, the early twentieth century, their thoughts might gravitate towards Paris in the 1920s, or ...
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Where the Avant-Garde Went to Grow