Literary scholars largely agree that the Romantic period altered the definition of tragedy, but they have confined their analyses to Western European authors. Maksim Hanukai introduces a new, illuminating figure to this narrative, arguing that Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin, can be understood as a tragic Romantic poet, although in a ......
Ronya Othmann's debut novel narrates the coming of age of Leyla, a Yazidi-Kurdish-German girl. She spends the school year in her mother's home country of Germany but travels every summer to her father's home village in Syria, near the Turkish border. She knows its smells and tastes. She knows its stories. She knows where the Yazidi villagers keep ......
The characters-young and old, queer and straight, contemporary and historical-who inhabit Lynn C. Miller's stories often find themselves in defining moments and crisis situations. As they search through the archives of memory, truth, and experience, they seek to understand not only the past and present but themselves. Stretching the definition ......
The characters who inhabit Sarah Layden's short story collection are on the verge of change-if only they could see themselves and their situations with greater clarity. Caught in the midst of crises, they stumble toward the future without fully understanding their past. Layden's deft, spare prose sketches worlds and lives with telling details, ......
While trying to drum up additional work, down-on-his-luck handyman Don Lank spies an imitation Tiffany lamp shining in the front window of a house. He offers the elderly widow who answers the door $800 for it-knowing he can sell it to a dealer for several hundred dollars more than that. Only the lamp turns out to be real-and worth at least ......
Mamah Borthwick was an energetic, intelligent, and charismatic woman who earned a master's degree at a time when few women even attended college, translated writings by a key figure of the early feminist movement, and taught at one of Germany's best schools for boys. She is best known, however, as the mistress of the famous American architect ......
Appearing on the first page of Dante Di Stefano's Midwhistle, a flock of blackbirds braids its way throughout this book-length poem-an elegy to life itself. A sprawling, digressive love note to an unborn son, it is also a celebration of the life and legacy of poet William Heyen, a meditation on midlife, and an exploration of the food and fuel of ......
The poems in Radium Girl hold dual citizenship in the land of the sick and the kingdom of the well. The point where illusion ends and reality begins is never clear, as Celeste Lipkes evokes saints, magicians, scientists, and caregivers in the process of surviving both medical illness and medical training. Slippery metaphors of rabbits in hats, ......
"Words carry the dead like henchmen," in Joshua Burton's extraordinary debut volume, Grace Engine. These spare and powerful poems are like pallbearers, like eulogists, like survivors, like battered souls hoping and dreaming for a future that may never be. Grappling head-on with the history of lynchings, mental illness, and the endurance of black ......
