Everything the wind blows on has decisions to make. The latest novel from Sarah Hall joins a growing conversation about non-human consciousness—and explores it with more joy, and more filth, than your average climate novel.
Actor, producer, and director Alon Nashman discusses World Play, an ongoing series of readings performed in multiple languages around a theme, and the pleasures of deep listening.
Tia Glista unravels the Möbius strip of narrative in Catherine Lacey’s latest book—a hybrid of memoir and fiction, about a recent break-up and an earlier loss of faith—and reflects on her own break with God, and what faith means in the first place.
In No Fault, Haley Mlotek searches for the language of love’s quiet undoing—from grief to the unexpected grace that comes with choosing to leave a marriage. Patrick Pittman traces what happens when cultural expectations, legal reform, and literary form converge in the finality of divorce.
Maybe true artistic freedom isn’t about about perseverance, but knowing exactly when to stop. Jowita Bydlowska reflects on the decision by her mentor and friend Barbara Gowdy to quit writing.
Revisiting Cynthia Ozick’s writings on Helen Keller and Anne Frank, both included in the writer’s new career-spanning essay collection, are reminders that all Ozick’s tales feel like cautionary ones—it’s just not always clear what to avoid or how.
When it comes to 20th century intellectual power-couples, no two represented more disparate ideas about marriage and freedom than the chain-smoking liberationists Sartre and de Beauvoir on the one hand, and the neoliberal economists Milton and Rose Friedman on the other.
The question of whether plants could have consciousness has not been left quietly back in the ’70s, as Linda Besner discovers in Zoë Schlanger’s new book, The Light Eaters.
