I like to say my new novel, Underjungle, is a tale of love, loss, family, and war—set entirely underwater. So War and Peace , but three-thousand feet deeper. And considerably shorter. And maybe a little funnier, too. It’s also the story of an intelligent, meditative, and sometimes tempestuous species that discover a human body and […]
Award-winning poet and writer Téa Mutonji is Western’s incoming writer-in-residence. (Sarah Bodri photo) As Western’s incoming writer-in-residence, Téa Mutonji feels right at home, relating to students. The award-winning poet and author is a student herself, currently pursuing her MFA in the low-residency creative writing program at NYU, where she was awarded the 2021 Jill Davis […]
Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover of Lilly Dancyger’s forthcoming essay collection about female friendship, First Love , which will be published by The Dial Press in May. Here’s a bit more about the book from the publisher: When Lilly Dancyger’s beloved cousin Sabina was murdered just as both girls were entering their […]
Do memes live rent-free in your head? The Workaholic writers’ room famously kept whiteboards of “over-done jokes” that were verboten. From edge to edge, you can find bits of brain decay dating back several years like rings on the brittle stump of pop culture: “Too soon?” “Laughy McLaugherson.” “We have fun.” “That’s not a thing.” […]
Photo by Louis Reed on Unsplash For me, the term “mad scientist” brings to mind images of bubbling beakers filled with neon liquids; elongated, menacing silhouettes; and of course (Pinky and) the Brain. There is a long history of stories from Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau all the way to Rick and Morty […]
Photo by Hasnain Babar on Unsplash I can’t usually stomach full-fledged horror, but give me a flicker of the unsettling or otherworldly in literature and I’m hooked. There’s no idyllic suburb in which I’m not looking for a barbaric ritual, or a new friend whose eyes I’m not searching for some terrible secret. In the […]
Photo by Markos Mant via Unsplash There’s something inherently magical about reading in the summer. Perhaps it dates back to those formative elementary school days of furiously cataloging summer reads for the chance at winning a free personal pizza, but the words “summer” and “reading” bring only positive associations to mind. With only a few […]
Five times in my historical novel Sparrow , the character Calidus, a young provincial Roman who is the oldest son of a brothel owner uses the late twentieth century idiom, “Whatever.” On each occasion one of his free employees is telling him something he doesn’t particularly want to deal with. Twice he waves his hand […]
One day in late April, two enormous boxes arrived at my door. Together, they weighed eighty-six pounds. For the last two years, my brothers and I had been renting a storage unit in L.A. so we would not have to deal with our parents’ stuff. This was an arrangement I would have been happy to […]
Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images “I found myself spending so much time looking for cheating that I missed the most important aspect of my grading: the ideas that students were actually coming up with,” writes Matthew Fulford. First Person is where Chalkbeat features personal essays by educators, students, parents, and others thinking and writing about […]
