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Paradise Drowned
Behold my favorite shot: The camera is static. Eli Sunday emerges out of the bottom-right corner. His black figure blocks almost half of our view. On his left, a toxic pool of oil placidly parades as a bizarre facsimile of the sky, while the pipe discharging the thick fluid seems instead to spew out light…
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Cerveza (A story)
I “You know—I used to have a dog—before you came about—” The branches creaked under each of his floundering steps. He had once again lost his way and the plot, and, like an old horse mechanically returning home after forgetting where he was headed, launched into one his well-trod anecdotes. My ears were already splintering.…
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Sister Carrie (1900), Theodore Dreiser
Sister Carrie is a bizarre book, obsessed with fashion, offering a clash between form and content. Naturalism always revels in a preposterous sense of essentialism and determinism. Case in point: Theodore Dreiser’s heroine has an atavistic instinct for shopping. In fact, the obtrusive narration of Sister Carrie keeps making osten-tedious arguments about women and fashion.…
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The Unexamined Language
Language is power. It is the most malleable material of our world. And it is also our mightiest, though most treacherous tool. It has the capacity to slither silently between our senses and the world, to burrow deep into our brains and rewire the living cables of our body, to hack our perception of reality.…
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Proust and My Day
Proust’s sentences are like extended, protracted, interminable, long-drawn-out silkworms ; precious creatures producing the finest of fabric: text. Even people who have never read any of Proust’s writing know that his sentences are gentle behemoths–so long as to make you forget they even had a beginning once you reach their elusive end. They might not…
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Speech Marks Blowing in the Wind
Frankissstein (2019) by Jeanette Winterson and The Passenger (2023) by Cormac McCarthy don’t have much in common, except that they’re both entirely devoid of speech marks. Better literary scholars probably have deeper things to say about these two very sophisticated meditations on love, life and death, but having to teach literature to students who sometimes…
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The History of Sound (2024), Ben Shattuck
The History of Sound has a sense of the ephemeral and the historical, of continuity and rupture. It creates a present perpetually haunted by unintelligible echoes of the past, siren calls of blighted archives. The stories are spread over some three centuries of New England history, from the colonial era to the recent past, in…
Sarah Owl Jewett
From the desk of –
Sarah Owl Jewett 