Wuthering Hair
For lovers of Emily Bronte’s classic 1847 gothic novel, Emerald Fennell’s new film adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” is full of surprises, from the gratuitous public hanging at the movie’s start, to...
View ArticleReclaiming Sylvia Plath: Still Iconic, More Human
A conversation with scholar Emily Van Duyne by Nels P. Highberg In Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation (W.W. Norton and Co., July 2024), professor and scholar Emily Van Duyne shatters the mythic image...
View ArticleKinds of Blue: Notes on the Avonlea Village Improvement Society and Teen...
Have you ever seen a color so “mortifying,” such a “burning shame,” that it prompts “blank dismay,” provokes angry tears and “bitterness of spirit,” galvanizes a community to outrage and “public...
View ArticleNotes On Passing
Rebecca Hall’s film Passing (Netflix) is a passion project, born of many people’s commitment to Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel of the same name. We share this attachment to Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance...
View ArticleHow Reading Queer Authors Improved My Relationships
In 16 years of teaching literature, I cannot think of a line that hit me harder than Celie’s declaration about Shug, the love of her life: “Just cause I love her don’t take away none of her rights.”...
View ArticleLaterally Cool
I’d neither heard nor heard of Crystal Gayle’s 1977 Grammy Award-winning hit “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” until the second time I read Rachel Kushner’s 2013 novel The Flamethrowers. I was...
View ArticleIn Praise of Dog Books
Last March, when the world went into quarantine, I began losing weight and reading about dogs. My partner, meanwhile, made sourdough, Caesar salad, and matzah ball soup. I was too busy to eat, though,...
View ArticleCharlotte Brontë’s OCD
The year I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder was the same year I discovered Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Villette. Lucy’s story is, like mine, one of a young woman who moves away from home...
View ArticleReading With Sam See
“To accept the ways in which one is lost is to be found and not found.” — Muñoz, Cruising 73. “I’m building the / archive of a life that shouldn’t exist, while it still does” — (Pico, Junk, 72). A...
View ArticleThe Prescience of Octavia Butler’s Kindred
Since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, acknowledgments of Octavia E. Butler’s prescience have become more routine. With its stark picture of citizens desperate for water and safety, her 1993 novel...
View ArticleJane Austen Was Not Fucking Around about Home School
[dropcap style=”normal or inverse or boxed”]T[/dropcap]his fall, white America is in the throes of (yet another, but hopefully broader) awakening to its own history and present of white supremacist...
View ArticleMoby Dick and Breastfeeding
Moby Dick, that magnum opus of American literature, famously contains no women. (They are in the background but not part of the action). But it does have breastfeeding. Mother whales nurse their...
View ArticleA Novel for the Plague Years
When the Spanish Influenza comes on stage in William Maxwell’s 1937 novel They Came Like Swallows, the family at the heart of the book pays it little attention. The reader knows, however, that this is...
View ArticleAdvanced Pain Studies
I read Lisa Olstein’s Pain Studies straight through a headache day. Her account of chronic migraine is unexpectedly bright and punchy. It forgoes ponderous phenomenology; it forgoes arguing for her...
View ArticleThe Displaced Detective
Over a year after I first read The Moonstone, it’s not the famously twisty plot that stands out to me. And it’s not how Wilkie Collin’s 1868 novel does what it’s often praised for doing — setting the...
View ArticleLady Catherine de Bourgh Tells You How To Pack For Your Summer Vacation
So. I have some thoughts about your packing. Your gowns are not well packed. I have been looking them over, and they are not well packed. What were you thinking? You have just sort of – done what...
View ArticleReclaiming Sylvia Plath: Still Iconic, More Human
A conversation with scholar Emily Van Duyne by Nels P. Highberg In Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation (W.W. Norton and Co., July 2024), professor and scholar Emily Van Duyne shatters the mythic image...
View ArticleKinds of Blue: Notes on the Avonlea Village Improvement Society and Teen...
Have you ever seen a color so “mortifying,” such a “burning shame,” that it prompts “blank dismay,” provokes angry tears and “bitterness of spirit,” galvanizes a community to outrage and “public...
View ArticleNotes On Passing
Rebecca Hall’s film Passing (Netflix) is a passion project, born of many people’s commitment to Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel of the same name. We share this attachment to Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance...
View ArticleHow Reading Queer Authors Improved My Relationships
In 16 years of teaching literature, I cannot think of a line that hit me harder than Celie’s declaration about Shug, the love of her life: “Just cause I love her don’t take away none of her rights.”...
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