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The first women returning to the shore found the handbag. Along the river, in a grassy hollow on the bank where they met each month, the purse went unnoticed by the women until they were just upon the spot where it huddled curiously among their towels and clothes. The women had been out quite far…
Reading a book about reading books is like entering a hall of mirrors: the experience is at once fascinating and disturbing. Like other stories about books and writing, The Book Censor’s Library drags the reader into itself, claiming to be one kind of book but unexpectedly (and imperceptibly) turning into another. Even the title throws…
To call prose cinematic is often to imply that its descriptions are heavily visual, focused on surfaces more than interiorities, and rich with sweeping panoramas, vivid colors, and dramatic action. Not here. While thoroughly cinematic, the forty-four stories in Terese Svoboda’s The Long Swim are shaped by techniques of the editing room more than the…
Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, William Walsh writes about The Poets from Erratum Press. + Samuel Taylor Coleridge identified four kinds of readers: I am all four kinds of reader, and, I suppose, all four kinds…
How might a woman writer in Gilded-Age Boston break free from the authorial identity fashioned by her publisher and take control over not just her writing but her life? Virginia Pye’s The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann is, at its core, a novel that centralizes women’s creative labor. Born Victoria Meeks and re-christened by her…
It is worth noting the absence of a question mark in the title of Jody Hobbs Hesler’s debut collection, What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better. These stories do not ask sarcastically or bitterly why we feel entitled to feel better. Rather, the collection explores surprising moments that do offer a possibility of…
Our Translation Notes series invites translators to describe some element of their process for a recent translation. This week Michael Kidd discusses the challenges of translating racialized language and the effects of contingency on translators and their work through a look at his recent translations of three examples of 17th century Spanish drama. + Translating…