Signs and Symbols
By Essay Issue 114
It had been four months since we’d run out of money. Somehow, we were still afloat.
Read MorePolyhydramnios (Or, the Second-Best Option)
By Essay Issue 113
In no world was there enough medication, technology, or manpower to keep everyone alive.
Read MoreThe Breaking
By Essay Issue 113
Even though Aylon painted it in 1978, there were still oil drops around the outside of the frame. The painting appeared to drip.
Read MoreAfter Disenchantment: C.S. Lewis, Sally Rooney, and the Perennial Hunger
By Culture Issue 113
Many have lamented that we don’t have a Lewis to help us think through these questions (or a Chesterton or a Tolkien to help him), but in my estimation Sally Rooney comes pretty close.
Read MoreI Trust My Soul to Grace: Paul Schrader’s Religious Imagination
By Culture Issue 113
Like a person caught in quicksand, the Schrader male antihero struggles toward salvation only to be driven deeper into the thing that’s swallowing him whole.
Read MoreLabor
By Essay Issue 113
The insides of our mothers’ bodies are the only places that are most certainly past. From then on, from there on, every room is just an echo of that first, red room.
Read MoreGnostic Ironies: New Poetry by Nathaniel Mackey and Fanny Howe
By Culture Issue 112
Like Mackey, [Howe] is forced to interpret the historical recurrence of evil as cruelly fated; human beings are the unwitting playthings of what she calls, in Manimal Woe, “the mystery of repetition.”
Read MoreAmerican Contrapasso: The Kingdoms Are Always Near
By Culture Issue 112
One can almost hear T.S. Eliot, the native Missourian in his self-imposed exile from America, looking out over these rust belts and muttering, “I had not thought that globalism had undone so many.”
Read MoreDry Leaves Tumble Down University Circle
By Essay Issue 112
Still, the novels and histories of madness couldn’t hold a candle—well, maybe Plath could—to stories of the Complete Nervous Breakdown I’d heard throughout childhood. My grandmother always had a story about somebody she knew who’d broken down.
Read MoreThe Party at Hart’s
By Essay Issue 112
I think Hart wanted—he was nothing if not a man of magnificent and consuming desires—the wrong things, or things to which he was not quite entitled. I have wanted them too
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