Essay Agnes Borinsky Essay Agnes Borinsky

Awe Studies: LINER NOTES

I suspect that everything I do or say after 11 pm is lunatic. Panic about it at 5 am. In real life a police officer shoots a man twenty times in his own backyard. Is there someplace else to stand? No. (Shaved pubes.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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