Editor and literary critic Oscar Villalon joins V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to celebrate the life and legacy of the novelist Cormac McCarthy, who died last month. The hosts and Villalon reflect on McCarthy’s vast vocabulary and cinematic descriptions, in which he juxtaposed lyrical prose with graphic violence. Villalon considers McCarthy’s use of regionally accurate […]
Nicole Flattery, author of Nothing Special, photographed by Maria Ródenas Sáinz de Baranda. There is no writer working today whose work makes me feel like Nicole Flattery ’s does. I first came to her fiction a few years ago through her collection of short stories, Show Them a Good Time . I was in bed […]
Diversity and representation are important in media, as we frequently highlight here at The Mary Sue . However, analyzing the privilege white writers have when telling stories about cultures and races that are not their own is equally important. Photographer and Writer Natalie Jacobsen (not the television anchor) recently announced her debut novel, a “Samurai […]
As a fiction writer, I’ve always felt compelled, memoir style, to pore over my life’s timeline. But in a novel, I can erase, revise, smash, crash, reconstruct, and transfigure that squiggly narrative. A novel has no obligation to mirror or represent anything familiar, recognizable, or real. And one of the main rules of play is […]
Life writing is a genre conventionally reserved for only the perspective of and the life of human beings. The genre is a form of self-expression that is exclusively accessible to humans. In the age of the Anthropocene where humans have had a significant impact on the planet and still have, the restriction of life writing […]
Writer Rajesh Parameswaran ( I Am An Executioner: Love Stories ) and painter and multimedia artist Joeun Kim Aatchim met at Yaddo in 2023, where they struck up an interdisciplinary friendship. In this conversation, they discuss the distractions of residencies, how much viewers and readers should be asked to imagine, artistic layering, shifts in perspective, […]
In her essay collection “Wannabe,” Aisha Harris argues that Black critics can both appreciate, and demand more from, shifts in popular culture. Among the pop culture subjects discussed in “Wannabe” (clockwise from top left): Lamorne Morris, at left, in “New Girl”; Will Smith in “King Richard”; John Legend; Gabrielle Union, at right, in “She’s All […]
Our recommended books this week take you from the depths of the ocean to the heights of the sky: Brad Fox’s “The Bathysphere Book” recounts a fascinating episode of deep-sea exploration in the 1930s (with gorgeous illustrations), and S.C. Gwynne’s “His Majesty’s Airship” revisits a British dirigible disaster from 1930 that was even deadlier than […]
In her memoir “A Matter of Appearance,” Emily Wells isn’t selling silver linings or looking away from hard truths Jean-Martin Charcot demonstrating hysteria in a hypnotized patient at the Salpêtrière. Etching by A. Lurat, 1888, after P.A.A. Brouillet, 1887. In a cultural milieu that is increasingly recognizing the value of narratives that describe the experience […]
As the sun climbs, people are folding their linens into packing cubes and squaring a nice good beach read on top—something to sink into in the glare of the Caribbean sun, or squint at through oversized sunglasses. Get yer sizzling beach reads! yells the internet ( us included, needless to say our list is the […]
