With gentle humor and insight, Lea Ypi draws rich portraits of the three caring adults she grew up with in the authoritarian world of her childhood in Albania.
Books
Book Review: “The Poetics of Cruising” — Imaginative Acts of Capture
By exploring the historical and artistic significance of cruising throughout poetry, photography, and visual culture, the book produces a rich and exciting topography of queer culture that posits a reflexive relationship of vicarious cruising between “cruising texts” and their consumers.
Book Review: Europe’s African Loot
Africa’s Struggle for Its Art usefully charts the prequel to current campaigns pressuring for the return of colonial plunder.
Short Fuse Podcast #53: Gwendolyn Brooks — A Poet’s Work in the Community
Nic Caldwell talks with Elizabeth Howard about poet Gwendolyn Brooks, her work, and the recent acquisition of her personal papers for the Morgan Library and Museum collection and the exhibition he curated.
Book Review: “The Hawk’s Way” — Up-Close and Personal with Birds of Prey
Sy Montgomery raises the question of our relationship to the world and all its animals and nudges us toward the view that even predators deserve our support and admiration because of the value they bring to our planet.
Book Review: The South – What Jim Crow Was and Wasn’t
We need to realize how important class is in order to understand how inequality can rise as Confederate monuments fall.
Book Review: Thomas Mann in America
In the US, Thomas Mann tacitly proposed himself as an almost messianic figure, stately, dramatic, and wrathful at once, striding forth to represent German culture in exile and, increasingly, free Germany itself.
Book Review: “Nobody Gets Out Alive” — A Big, Brash Book of Alaskan Stories
You will have to be up for this short story collection ; you will learn a lot about a corner of the world that’s rarely captured, and is done so here exceptionally well.
Author Interview: Jennifer Haigh on Writing About Abortion — With Roe v. Wade Likely to be Overturned
“As a writer, I was drawn to a subject I can’t make sense of any other way. So the questions swirling around abortion are so close to my heart I just had to write about it.”
Author Interview: Kathleen C. Stone on “They Called Us Girls: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men””
“Some women ignored what was expected and forged careers in fields traditionally reserved for men. In other words, they had “men’s” jobs. I wanted to know where that ambition came from.”