Death of the Author is the story of Zelu, the black sheep of an anything-but-ordinary Nigerian-American family. Her parents and her four siblings are astronomically accomplished STEM exemplars dwelling comfortably in Chicago's upper middle class. Not only are they educated and wealthy, they are also
On the surface, the draw of Wuthering Heights may be its timeless romance. But what makes this romance so powerful, and what drives the more significant portions of the book, is unfettered, uncontrolled, unleashed youth. The novel is full of young people making stupid decisions and reaping the consequences, either
I guess I only have one question to ask of David Fishkind’s debut novel, Don’t Step Into My Office: Who is this for, exactly? I’ll be the first one to argue that art doesn’t need to be made for an audience. It can and should simply
It’s hard for me to engage with COVID-19 pandemic media. When characters pick up masks and testing swabs or start stocking their pantries for quarantine, I try to follow their stories–and ram headfirst into a translucent wall of foot-thick epoxy in my mind. I watch the
It’s been done before. That’s the starting point for Alice and Peter, two grad students who have made it their mission to go to Hell. There is nothing new under the sun in their world of analytic magick, and so they, like any other students of mathematics, literature,
Octavia Butler is most famous for her Parable of the Sower, published in 1993 and featuring prescient themes about social and climate justice that remain relevant more than three decades later. Butler was a productive author and worked on many books, stories, and essays before and after Sower, many of
It’s a disservice to reduce Endling to a simple novel. It’s revision as performance, the unimaginably talented Reva rewriting her work live for the reader even as she has new thoughts and receives new information in real time. We observe her raw process and are transfixed as we
Monstrilio introduces itself as a horror novel, but that’s like calling Titanic a musical. Sure, the string quartet’s rendition of Nearer My God to Thee is a climactic scene, and so is M eating people, but that’s hardly the point of either thing. In both cases, these
These are scary times for men. Successive waves of feminism have been crashing against the cliffs of patriarchal philosophy for decades now, and their erosive progress is evident. This has put subscribers to traditionalist views in a panic. Some of these traditionalists have responded by dreaming up horrible scenarios of