I’d been with Ignacio for a year when it was time to introduce him to my storage unit. We were doing the thing where you move in together just a few months before getting married. After the divorce from my first marriage, I’d put my things away in an air-conditioned storage and bounced around for…
The second half of the 19th century found Europe in a precarious position. The Christian faith faced continued assaults from major developing forces. Rapid industrialisation and mass production through machines took away the value previously placed on the unique potential of a human. Imperialism reduced religion to a tool to justify the oppression of the…
In the third chapter of her book, The Reading Figure in Irish Art in the Long Nineteenth Century, Tricia Cusack records a pivotal scene from a short story by Sarah Grand (73–74). Grand, a prominent, late-nineteenth-century women’s rights activist in Ireland, captures one possible reaction to “the New Woman,” in her story, “The Undefinable” (73)….
Your work is really marketable, you know, with the #MeToo movement and all. Yes, a male poetry professor actually said this to me my first semester in a MFA creative writing program. In hindsight, one goal of every MFA from a technical standpoint is to create authors that are marketable. More money equals bigger names…
‘Indeed, the moment an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dumb or amazing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman’. 1 For the enfant terrible, that young and particular breed of artist, commerce is not an area of…
Introduction Silence is often misunderstood as emptiness—a lack of words, a gap in the narrative, an unfinished conversation. Yet, in literature, silence is never empty. It is deliberate. It carries weight, tension, and meaning that words alone cannot hold. Writers across centuries have used silence as a powerful narrative device: to express what characters cannot…
“The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones” – William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar It is often said evil supersedes death. That we carry our goodwill to our grave while our injustices live on, despite our corporal disappearance. It is often told a lie gets halfway across the …
We live in a time where internet is everywhere, in our pockets, on our desks, and even woven into our daily routines. It helps us build careers, stay informed, connect with people across the globe—and yet, something strange is happening. Despite being more connected than ever, many of us feel more alone. The internet is…
I was reading The Silent Woman (1993) by Janet Malcolm, a book on the life of Sylvia Plath. What I thought to be a simple biography of the poet turned out to be more than that. The book was about the people who wrote about and profited from the now-deceased Sylvia Plath. The main way…
When not hot on the scent of a miscreant at large, the armchair detective staves off boredom by pretending to read their narrator’s mind. Congeniality, after all, is among their investigative toolkit. They never lose composure before their foes and partners in justice, because they never take their cases personally— their expeditions are merely a…