The Empty Spotlight: On Nicolette Polek’s “Bitter Water Opera”
Bitter Water Opera by Nicolette Polek IN THE PENULTIMATE scene of The Red Shoes (1948), a spotlight strikes the stage. A man presents his hand to a closed door. It opens; there is nothing inside. He spins, and the spotlight spins with him. He leaps, pirouettes, and raises his arms, the spotlight following just beyond […]
A Tale of Four Troubled and Talented Sisters, Told With Irish Flair
The illustration shows a hilly Irish countryside under a nighttime sky, with three sisters searching for their lost fourth sibling in the foreground. THE ALTERNATIVES, by Caoilinn Hughes Caoilinn Hughes’s exuberant third novel opens with Olwen Flattery, a geology professor, lecturing her undergraduate students about tectonic convergence. “ Just imagine the force it would take […]
Against Journaling: Dennis Tang on the Joys of Not Writing It All Down
I remember being a small child, doing arithmetic at the kitchen table, but not what state I was in—Delaware, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, we moved all around. I remember the face of my middle school bully, but not his name. I remember falling desperately in love with a girl in my college Shakespeare lecture, but not what […]
To Polly Atkin, “Diagnosis is Like a Wedding”
Photo by Andreas Strandman via Unsplash Often in illness narratives, the diagnosis marks a moment of triumph. There’s an a-ha moment and the main character rejoices, finally having a name for their symptoms. A medication or course of treatment available that might bring the patient to their former body. There is a sense of restoration, […]
10 Queer Books For People With Mommy Issues
In literature, as in real life, complicated mothers and our relationships with them affect us whether they’re in the room or on the page with us or not. I’m interested in books where mothers are not necessarily central characters—some are dead when the story begins, for example—but whose impacts (or absence) are far-reaching. The sort […]
Ada Limón Won’t Let Prose Touch the Poetry on Her Shelves
Credit…Rebecca Clarke “I mean that as an organizing principle,” says the U.S. poet laureate, who has edited a new anthology of nature poetry called “You Are Here,” “and also as a slight against prose.” Credit…Rebecca Clarke What books are on your night stand? My night stand doesn’t speak to me anymore. That’s because, here’s the […]
The Problem With Parents
Gary Clement Children’s books have long featured pint-size heroes overcoming fierce antagonists: ogres, witches and big bad wolves. So it comes as no surprise that a similar drama occurs in these three stories. Only here, children are up against something far more complex: their parents. These moms and pops — by turns cruel, overprotective, distracted […]
How to improve your writing using Gemini AI 1.5 for free
If you are looking for ways to improve your writing both for pleasure and business you might be interested to know that a wealth of tools are available at your disposal. Google DeepMind’s AI studio has made Gemini 1.5, a powerful tool that uses artificial intelligence to study literature in depth. This guide will show […]
“No Nights (or Chapters) Off.” And Other Grown Up Lessons From Reading to My Kids
There has been one single experience that taught me more about storytelling than anything else in my life: telling bedtime stories to my children. Live audiences can be merciless; ask any comedian. Workshopping fiction can be rough, too. But I’d submit that while your own children won’t heckle you or carve up your prose with […]
Alexandra Tanner on Vulnerability, Making Money as a Writer, and Taking Literary Shortcuts
I met Allie Tanner in November of 2016 at the Brooklyn reading series Franklin Park. The first words she ever said to me were “Are you okay?” (I was. I used to call the raffle at Franklin Park, and felt that microphones were for cowards, so I did not use them.) We’ve been together for […]