Western mythology has long been dominated by men, with female characters relegated to the fringes, or filtered through the male gaze. Now, women are giving new life to female characters. For centuries, the Greek Gorgon Medusa has been cast as a vicious monster, a beastly woman with writhing snakes for hair and a deadly gaze […]
Reality is not always probable, or likely. —Jorge Luis Borges CALLING THE GROUCHY and godly Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) a “science fiction writer,” pegging him as a single-genre scribe, is an inaccurate and constraining description. Granted, he wrote a lot of sci-fi, much of which remains redoubtable, replete with indelible, iniquitous, uproarious images conjured by his […]
Photo by Cathryn Lavery via Unsplash Of all the craft books I’ve read in my life, perhaps none have stuck with me quite as clearly as the assertion, at the beginning of Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook , that, rather than waiting for inspiration to strike, an aspiring writer must sit down regularly for an […]
Empty Spaces by Jordan Abel ABOUT 100 YEARS AGO, the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky argued that the purpose of art is “to make a stone stony.” He meant something like this: we are easily desensitized to everyday things like the little pebbles that litter our paths. We don’t truly see them, we just recognize […]
The poet Diane Seuss and I began a recent conversation by talking about the burdens of companionship—or, at least, how those burdens are manifested through affection for a pet. Seuss lost her dog Bear during the pandemic. When we spoke, by phone, she was at home in Michigan preparing her new dog, Stella—whom she described […]
Hit Man, the new film from director Richard Linklater, isn’t really about a hit man. It’s about the myth of the hit man, or at least “the hitman-for-hire.” Yes, occasionally, mafias and shady corporations and dictatorships do seem to have assassins to sic on their enemies. But the idea that any random person can track […]
Phonlamai Photo / Shutterstock When ChatGPT emerged a year and half ago, many professors immediately worried that their students would use it as a substitute for doing their own written assignments — that they’d click a button on a chatbot instead of doing the thinking involved in responding to an essay prompt themselves. But two […]
Note: The following story contains spoilers from “The Good Doctor” Season 7, Episode 10. “The Good Doctor” made one last groundbreaking save in the ABC medical drama’s series finale on Tuesday, which executive producers called a “challenging” finale for the characters after the show moved past its originally envisioned conclusion. Showrunner Liz Friedman and creator […]
If you were the kind of young reader that I was, you devoured the Redwall books by Brian “ allowed to smoke indoors ” Jacques as fast as you could. The medieval-inspired fantasy books about mice, otters, hedgehogs and other forest heroes defending their Abbey against weasels, rats, and stoats were one of my earliest […]
The following is from Thomas Grattan’s In Tongues . Grattan is the author of the novel The Recent East , which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, One Story, Slice , and The Colorado Review . He has an MFA […]
