Sean Avery Medlin’s debut collection, 808s & Otherworlds (Two Dollar Radio, 2021), is set up like a deluxe box set, the kind that collects a bevy of best tracks and unreleased B-sides and packages it with new art and extended liner notes full of stories verging on myth.

…I will be here when America is nothing but a place of ruins.

On October 1, 1810, about a week before his 33rd birthday, the author and playwright Heinrich von Kleist published the first issue of the world’s very first daily newspaper.

Growing up, especially in a small town, means deciding whether to leave home or stay.

The autumn equinox of my 30th year…

My response to the idea of art as activism fluctuates.

All mystics have the same problem.

On Thursday, September 2, 2021, the day after the Supreme Court decides to uphold Texas’s near-total abortion ban, an email with the subject line “Just Checking-in with You All” lands in my inbox.

For anyone convinced that capitalism has eroded all valid forms of mental or perceptual resistance available in art, Jennifer Ponce de León’s Another Aesthetics is Possible will serve as testimony that this conclusion is not only premature but fundamentally wrong.

I remember my first exposure to Emily Ratajkowski.

I spent the early years of my life in a rural part of northern Ohio with my underemployed mom, a severely disabled father, and a closeted gay racecar driver friend of my mom’s.

On one hand, Kyle Lucia Wu’s debut novel Win Me Something captures the particular season of life in which everyone else seems to have it together.

To feel pity, Aristotle writes in the Rhetoric, one must believe in the goodness of at least some people. Robin McLean’s debut novel, Pity the Beast, looks at what its heroine calls “the other side of good.”

As politicians across the country willfully let people succumb to a deadly virus and do their best to rig the political system, this might be a good time to think about the nature of direct political action.

“Sometimes it seems / the future has a habit of repeating itself” writes Devon Walker-Figueroa in her debut, Philomath, a poetry collection with two separate arms: a woman’s childhood and coming of age amongst the masculine fugue required to survive a ghost town, and the struggle for continuance amid capitalism’s exploitations and abandonments.

Edith Wharton was “twenty-seven or -eight” before she was able to sleep in a room that contained even a single ghost story.

The British writer Olive Moore is one of the great forgotten figures in literary history.

What does the world want, what is the world still capable of becoming?

Maybe you’ve heard about the algorithmic racial bias in digital imaging technology.

Olga Bokuchava left behind a traumatic childhood in the Soviet Union (along with the suspicious, rhythmic stabbing of a neighbor “once, twice, thrice”) and immigrated to Milwaukee with her family, from whom she then became mysteriously estranged.