Mullen hands us this unsellable product of the Diary Industry as if it were what we’d always wanted—a project book stripped of recognizable content by the very process of that projection. It’s genre-ending.

After we peel back the narratives that we spin subconsciously, those stories that are shaped by external forces—whether capricious lovers or restrictive laws—maybe we are free to craft new ones.

But if it’s impossible to determine the combination of forces that might elevate a woman to the status of It Girl, that doesn’t mean we have ever stopped trying.

An inchoate despair is the dominant mood of the novel, as Natsumi’s feelings of emptiness, dizziness, and vertigo collide against her Sisyphean rituals of domesticity.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the story of Elena’s own life is the story of the Russia that was decisively lost in February 2022.

Like a smothering deformative blight, these poems arrive in remission, the moment before full collapse, a slipstream incongruity between locations, futurities, and the clouded cataracts of speculation.

Baseball’s current executives cannot advance the sport as an antidote to the forces that make our lives less lifelike. The logical conclusion of their approach is the slot machine. The desired consumer is not a fan, but an addict.

Nothing feels like it can be trusted: the quotes, the packaging of the narrative, even the narrator herself. This, of course, makes the novel’s own point—that any telling of a story betrays much more about the speaker than the subject.

The best stories are about people who we don’t really know but think we could. Had we gone to that party we missed; had we been born without that mole.

The text contends that there is such a thing as public space, and that the poet can intervene in it. Moreover, it asserts that Buffalo—a poor, working-class city in the Rust Belt, crumbling from decades of neglect—is capable of ecstatic beauty.

There are no shoulds besides making marks on a page and arranging those words in a particular order; what’s left is a condition of the present, of taste which cannot exactly be spoken to before it changes.

do we live here — wedreamstories&scenesbutwedontlivethem (Notley) — or here — ppleatcronuts&frankoceanieatbusilybetweenyourlegs (Chang)

Writing histories of struggle alongside imagined futures of collective care, there is no isolated subject. Silt’s essays and poems serve as a sprawling manifesto, showcasing the peculiarities of pleasure under capitalism.

Hašek is mocking authority and bourgeois respectability, of course, but the criticism is ultimately of the individual’s inability to tolerate being the butt of a joke. If the universe is absurd, then we shouldn’t be so foolish as to take it seriously.

Their most valuable contribution comes not from extrapolating what “Thoreau would say” about contemporary problems, but in showing where his ideas can lead us when paired with a more robust sense of class consciousness and a stronger drive for action.

In a time of ever-escalating state violence towards intersex, gender non-conforming, and trans people, what do cis scholars writing about gender owe their subjects?

The most beguiling aspect of My Search for Warren Harding is the way Plunket manages to discount the meaning of romance, literature, and history to such an extent that none much help us read his novel.

Rather than a rurality for tourists, a land recast as a bourgeois playground pervaded by natural and cultural heritage, Cain attempts a rurality that is grotesque and potent. He performs a pastoral contaminated by history.

Taylor’s characters fail to reconcile deeper emotional desires with the reality that their immediate environment is not a place to escape, but rather the very territory in which “real life” happens.

In that pulse between orality and literacy, the history of thinking and breathing, something forced—to hurl. Somewhere someone is apologizing for existing.