If you want to observe the advancing rigor mortis of American capitalism, you could do worse than take a flight. This is not news. In Dr. David Dao, dragged so violently from that United flight, we even have an icon for the familiar, dehumanizing onslaught of corporate contempt.
Read moreRebecca Solnit tries to answer 'The Mother of All Questions' →
In its content, “The Mother of All Questions” reinforces Solnit’s gift of hope; in the circumstances of its publication in this bleak year, it obliges readers to put it to use.
Read moreAmelia Gray's 'Isadora' is a heavenly celebration of women in charge of their bodies →
In this era of history commandeered by toxic masculinity with delusions of superhumanity, there’s a lot to be said for remembering the truth of the body, particularly the female and otherwise marginalized bodies that are so likely to be written out of the story.
Read moreThe Ice by Laline Paull review – allegory in the Arctic →
“Where is the fiction about climate change?” Amitav Ghosh asked in these pages last year. It’s a good question: glance at most publishers’ catalogues and you would never know that humanity was facing the greatest challenge of its existence.
Read moreArgentinian star Samanta Schweblin's destabilizing English debut, 'Fever Dream' →
Over the last two decades, Argentina’s rural communities have reported skyrocketing rates of birth abnormalities, miscarriages and cancer. In the same period, genetically modified soy has blanketed the region, helped along by copious pesticides.
Read moreIn the space of dreams: Wendy Ortiz's 'Bruja' is vivid and dark →
If you chart the history of dream writing, you get a map of ideas about fate and individual agency through the ages.
With a few notable exceptions, the ancients and medieval Europeans saw dreams as divine messages; spaces in which you might learn about the destiny assigned to you.
Read moreSERIES: Construction Sites of Los Angeles →
The crane swings, improbably sure of itself, and lowers its mouth to the side street. Men in hardhats feed it elaborate squares of raw wood, and up it goes. Thirty feet in the air, these slats will separate silent masturbation from dead-eyed TV-watching from dinners ruined by inappropriate recipe substitutions. One day, someone will place their forehead on the wood’s plaster covering and roll it softly from side to side, wondering how they got it all so wrong.
Read moreFrom Muir to Matriarchs: The New, Female-Penned Nature Novel →
As apocalyptic weather events grow ever more frequent, a group of women nature writers is urging readers to listen to — and care for — our warming Earth.
The ideal end point of women's will to empowerment might well be to show the rest of the species that our real master, all along, wasn't men but the planet.
Read morePallacorda, or What the Hell Has Happened in Mexico →
A review of Álvaro Enrigue's Sudden Death
And so the world is one long struggle, and the bad guy always wins and steals the spoils. Yet we have this novel, a work so beautiful it might take your breath away.
Read moreIn Nunatsiavut in Northern Canada, a Community Faces the Mental Health Impact of Climate Change →
In Nunatsiavut, people used to wait impatiently for winter. The remote region on Canada’s northeastern coast has been home to Inuit and their ancestors for thousands of years.
Read moreAfter the Crash →
Christos Ikonomou, Rafael Chirbes, and new fiction from the eurozone.
In July last year, the printing presses ground to a stop in Greece. The country was in uncharted territory, its banks under a stranglehold as the nation said oxi to austerity. While the streets exploded in righteous rage, publishers couldn’t pay their bills and printers couldn’t buy paper or ink.
Read moreThe Desert vs Renewable Energy: A Shitstorm →
An almighty shitstorm has been brewing in the Californian desert for the last decade or so. Everything finally erupted in September 2014, when a group of federal and state agencies released the draft of an eye-wateringly ambitious proposal they’d been working on for six years: the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, or DRECP.
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