When I was twenty-one, I became friends with a group of models living in London and for a while we ran wild together, night after night in the city. The champagne was endless, the venues exclusive, and the stories they told me were spectacular. They were stories of excessive fees paid for lunch dates and […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Fly’ is not one of the best-known short stories of the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), but it is significant for being one of her few stories which deals directly with the First World War. In the story, a man is reminded of the death of his […]
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST: You listeners out there know I love a good scare. So for our series asking authors for summer reading recommendations, we had to get some picks to keep us reading through the nights with all the lights on. And Joe Hill has definitely scared me. He’s the author of “The Black Phone” […]
John H. Giordanengo was drawn to Colorado in ’96 to study ecological restoration at Colorado State University, and never left. His business and nonprofit work in Colorado, economics research and investigative interviews across the globe, and three decades of ecological experience are interwoven in “Ecosystems as Models for Restoring our Economies.” This book serves as […]
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 […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Machine That Won the War’ is a 1961 short story by the science-fiction author Isaac Asimov (1920-92). The story is set shortly after Earth and its associated worlds have won a war against an enemy civilisation known as the Denebians. A vast computer named Multivac is credited with […]
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 […]
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 […]
THE LABOR OF BEING lies at the heart of Sinking Bell , Bojan Louis’s first short-story collection, which made NPR’s list of “Books We Love” from 2022. In the context of genocidal colonialism, forced assimilation, and the cultural erasure of Diné voices, existing at all constitutes an act of strength. While history necessarily marks these […]
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 […]
