12/2/19The Fractured Politics of NamingFilm is a trickster’s medium, an illusion of an illusion. Though it purports to capture objective fact—as if holding…
11/5/19'Everything Is a Translation and Nothing Is': Jennifer Croft on Memoir, Etymology, and Translation“When you consider the plenitude of any word’s inheritance you might think all words are untranslatable,” writes…
10/14/19Moving Past the Myth of the Art MonsterIf you only know two sentences from Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, they are these: “My plan was to never get…
8/21/19Flamboyantly Unbound“Marcel Marceau’s first wife divorced him in 1958,” Shawn Wen writes of the famous mime. “She said he would not…
7/3/19Blood Isn't EverythingPity the protagonists of old-fashioned novels—just about everything seems to happen to them. They have an uncanny…
6/3/19Suicide and the Paradox of the MemoirA paradox lies at the center of any memoir about suicide, the fact that one can’t write about the desire to kill…
4/16/19Choosing Motherhood in the Face of the ApocalypseGiving birth is an apocalypse: one world ends, another becomes. In Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot, Cora sits alone in…