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Review: The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Headstrong girls and women make the best narrators—they’re sassy, agitated, and predisposed toward action once their inner injustice detectors calculate the full measure of their circumstances.

Break Through Whatever Happens to You

I am compelled, my dearest Adaugo, to tailor this letter to free your lovesick mind from silliness, for the likes of Obinna have loosened in your head that which makes us fools, keeping your sturdy soul in mental torture.

Random Truths About...Simontronic

Edgardo Flores is at work on a second album as Simontronic, a quirky and beautiful electronic project that he founded with Joe Fraley in Monrovia, CA. He is also the writer/director of a full length feature film, Ill Square.

Review: Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler

Right off the bat, Scorch Atlas asserts itself as, if not the coolest-looking book you’ve ever fanned between your fingers, on the short-list, interior and exterior alike.

Third Lesson

I don't have any important memories. I have a bunch of stupid memories.

The Humbling by Philip Roth coverReview: The Humbling by Philip Roth (1 of 2)

Reading Roth is like being instantly transferred into another mind, a mind in which all the boring crap has been burned away. It's mesmerizing and stimulating and exciting and soothing all at once

Review: The Humbling by Philip Roth (2 of 2)

It would be an understatement to say that Roth has never excelled at writing women characters. Aside from his vividly memorable depictions of his male protagonists’ mothers, Roth has rarely offered a convincing portrayal of a female character in a novel.

Interview: Lydia Millet, Author of Love in Infant Monkeys and How the Dead Dream

"The truth is I'm fascinated by the details where different circles of culture overlap and by the manifold ways in which we now treat the profane as the sacred and vice versa."

Whore of Babel

A foreign language is a perfect stand-in for a parent: stern but accomodating, solid but flexible. Immense, possibly well-travelled, with non-negotiable limitations that soothe and please as well as enrage. Apparently ageless (but certain to die). Infinitely present. Embracing. Yours.

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem coverReview: Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem

Chronic City can entertain readers and writers who are willing to patiently dissect its meaning and formulate its connections, who happily place ideas and themes on pedestals in whose shadows lurk plot and character.

A Guide to Museum Women

A comical look at the different types of women you're bound to find in an art gallery, from curator to docent.

art from wendy tetsu interviewThe Activist Artist: An Interview With Wendy Testu

San Francisco-based artist and teacher Wendy Testu discusses her latest project: a labor of love that galvanizes one community around its social and environmental history.

Random Truths About...Matthew Gray

Interview with Denton, TX musician Matthew Gray of Matthew & the Arrogant Sea on the urge to live raw, dream silly, and decategorize everything.

Daughter off the Cross

Irene admitted by degrees that she’d been diagnosed with advanced brain cancer. Suddenly I saw "my babysitter" more clearly, as someone self-interested, even willing to deceive me--commit that sin of passion--if she thought that's what it took to keep her with "her babies."

Major JacksonAural Improvisations: An Interview with Poet Major Jackson

"There is a period of gestation that leads to a kind of quiet and silence and distance, space. What filters through is what becomes the material for the poem."

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