While waiting for summer, we explore the arts in full–
I know that it is August, and that the summer will be coming to an end soon, but I’m resisting really acknowledging the actual date, besides it’s being Wednesday today, August something, with Labor Day right around the corner, because I am so not looking forward to having to give up this luxury of immersing
It’s not too often that I have to go back and re-read a book immediately after finishing it, especially such a short book (134 pages) as Deborah Levy’s slim memoir The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography. And yet, the spareness of Levy’s prose and the depth of her writing about the end of her
Here s a book that you might not want to read, especially if there are little children in your life or even if you are close to someone who cares for them. Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny is both a cautionary tale and an allegory of motherhood, and asks unsettling and difficult questions about identity
Leslie Jamison’ The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath is a book I’d wanted to read ever since I had finished her earlier book The Empathy Exams and had heard that she was writing a far-ranging examination of her own alcoholism set within the context of the myth of the great alcoholic writer. In these 511
I have to admit that I finished Aja Gabel’s magnificent debut novel, The Ensemble, last week, just three days after I’d started it. I would have finished it sooner, but I had to do some other things like eat and sleep and take the dog out for walks. If I could have figured out how
I’ve been to-ing and fro-ing nonstop since early spring, and I’m finally ready to settle down for a bit, sink into a lawn chair out in the sunlight of these long lingering Western New York late afternoons, and get started reading again. This book, The Ensemble, came to me in Gambier, Ohio at the Kenyon
After about the first fifty pages or so of Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil, I realized that my reading had slowed significantly, not just because the pages are very long and the typeface is very small, but also because of Nelson’s dense, carefully calibrated sentences that hold so much information
It was another rabbit-hole week for me, with my reading veering off into a book I’d never heard of but decided that I needed to read immediately when I came across a list of books in The Rumpus about what to read when you want to write like a mother. I wanted to know what
It was extraordinarily coincidental that I began reading these two particular books this week, Lia Purpura’s On Looking and Minna Proctor’s Do You Hear What I Hear? Religious Calling, the Priesthood, and My Father. Not wanting to formalize my reading list for these ten weeks or overthink which book I *should* read next in order
” So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair on the head of your vision, a shade of its color, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in
Open Arts Spring 2023 