Essay Benjamin Anthony Rhodes Essay Benjamin Anthony Rhodes

Awe Studies: Sound, Grief, and Imagination

I cry a little, too, because it all feels so cliché. That I should look at my mother and realize she’ll die one day. That she should notice my tears becoming heavenly–sorry, heavy–and approach me, open-armed.

Read More
Essay Zach Savich Essay Zach Savich

Awe Studies: An Introduction

The pieces in this series find ways to speak into and around awe—often figured as speechlessness, to be dumbfounded—and how its overwhelming facts can run through our lives.

Read More
Essay J. Arthur Boyle Essay J. Arthur Boyle

The Artist’s Self-Interest: On Capitalist Fiction

The idea that this cultural moment is specific to an era of progressivism, neoliberalism, or late capitalism (a term which always feels a little baselessly optimistic), does not seem accurate. Regular capitalism describes the moment pretty well.

Read More
Essay Greg Gerke Essay Greg Gerke

The Live Louise Glück

When you grow up alongside a writer and see them change and rearrange and deliver a new object still dripping sweat, that object looks different than if you were merely recovering it from the long march of literature by the no-longer living.

Read More
Essay Eric Sandy Essay Eric Sandy

An American Chestnut in Ohio 

The American chestnut gave me a chance to see something that actually was more or less gone from the natural world, to reach back into the distant past and get a sense of what climate destruction might rob from us again and again.

Read More
Essay Suspended Reason Essay Suspended Reason

A Gulf Polyphony

To even be suspected of treasure—to be indistinguishable from those who possess treasure—is to become a target. This is the lesson of the oyster.

Read More