Shelf Life

Film is a trickster’s medium, an illusion of an illusion. Though it purports to capture objective fact—as if holding…

If you only know two sentences from Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, they are these: “My plan was to never get…

“Marcel Marceau’s first wife divorced him in 1958,” Shawn Wen writes of the famous mime. “She said he would not…

Pity the protagonists of old-fashioned novels—just about everything seems to happen to them. They have an uncanny…

A paradox lies at the center of any memoir about suicide, the fact that one can’t write about the desire to kill…

Giving birth is an apocalypse: one world ends, another becomes. In Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot, Cora sits alone in…