A certain kind of glamor resides not just in possessing a void like the great emptiness—which lends the person who holds it an air of depth, impenetrability, and mystery—but in one’s reaching for destructive, impulsive, or obsessive remedies to fill that void.

I’d like the work I do to matter somehow, which is all the proof I need that it doesn’t.

As a midwesterner, my life has been saturated with Alberta’s oil. My first car, a used Ford F-150 with a bench seat stained brown from the plumber who owned it before me, had dual fuel tanks that held over thirty gallons of gasoline. Much of that gas came from Alberta oil.

Ishchenko argues that the burden of the post-Soviet left is debatably its greatest asset: that people remember how it felt to be part of communism’s utopian project, and that before today’s war, a strong plurality of Ukrainians felt ambivalent about, not hostile to, its cause.

Because this issue has been overlooked from a political and cultural and intellectual standpoint, partially because of its association with girls, I wanted to give it a really serious treatment.

Bale’s aim in this book is to write in a rigorous and entertaining way about medieval travel writing; it would be a disservice to the subject to exclude the fictitious or the tasteless.

The material conditions that underpinned social democracy have disappeared. Against this backdrop, left populism constitutes a sincere, but plaintive, desire for the lost world to return. 

There is an established tradition of Latin American novelists who started off as journalists.

Merchant demonstrates that to act as a Luddite is to be anything but out-of-touch: it is to mobilize a common sentiment that marches from the past, and to stride as part of a collective toward a more equitable future.

You thought you knew everything about couplets, and then realize there’s something new to discover in the familiar form. An uncovering of fossils, a tomb whose bones are still intact, jewelry in place and shining around the dusty vertebrae.

In many ways, Hume’s book is about the urge to look away from the brutalities and misogyny woven into daily American life. It’s also about what happens when we stop doing this: when we stop averting our eyes and look plainly.

And there’s manufactured insecurity, which is the kind of insecurity that facilitates the concentration of power and profit, the kind of insecurity imposed on us by our economic and political system. 

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.

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.

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?

Power doesn’t always come from brute force; in many cases it operates through obfuscation and mystification. Illuminating all of this is the easy part, of course. The challenge is figuring out how to empower the people who work under these conditions.

The book is organized around four city slogans, Queen City of the Lakes, City of Good Neighbors, City of Light, and City of No Illusions—taking the reader through a communal memoir that mirrors that of my family.

Failure, then, is a tonic for hubris, a lesser ward against the performative narcissism of perfection we wear as both shield and mask to navigate these craven times.

There’s also the question of genre itself: there’s an established tradition in American letters of privileging storytelling over truth-telling when it comes to what we might call literary journalism.