Precious Cargo
I have come all the way to New Orleans for this gumbo. It is nestled in a bowl in front of me, just shy of overflowing its banks. But, having just read Chris Arthur’s collection of essays, Hidden Cargoes, I see the gumbo differently.
Glorious, Golden, and Contemporary
Anthologies encourage us to look back and absorb vast swaths of literature. A good anthology can function as a shortcut to being well read and grant writers a stronger sense of historicity—something particularly valuable for essayists…
The Ways We Remain
Following Ned’s 2019 death from cancer, his wife, the novelist Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and his graduate school classmate John T. Price resolved to bring his published essays together as a collection (something the writer had planned to do himself but never got to finish)…
Who Do We Talk To?
For the past year, I have clicked on the Bookshop link to buy a book for every Zoom reading I attended. I agreed to receive a review copy from four publishers. I say yes, I can peer review this book for a university press. In the middle of the pandemic, I have no friends. I have no family. But I do have one hundred and fifty collections of essays per day per day squared…
To Limit Is to Define
The “limits of the essay,” Aquilina writes, “are not only productive in a definitional sense… but also crucial to understanding what is specific to the essay as a literary form.” Thus, rethinking the essay at the limits is an attempt to discover what is particular to the essay.
A Full Embrace of the Wandering Mind
Get Thee to a Bakery is a masterclass in how to make art out of the quotidian. Bailey tackles truly mundane subjects like haircuts, routine dentist visits, egg yolks, cold pizza, flooded basements, and the infuriating folks who continue to add two spaces after a period.