I don’t sit in cafés as often as I used to. In fact, I find myself reading through the menu at my former haunt just in case coffee has changed in the last two years. It hasn’t. There’s a comfort in that. I drink my coffee at home now. Hot espresso with cold vanilla milk straight from carton slides down…
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‘Mrs. Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf: Death and the Isolated Mind
Virginia Woolf’s second novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), is many things. On one level, it’s a psychological portrait of London’s residents after the first World War. On another, it’s a love triangle, but long after the drama has concluded, and when all that’s left is dust. Doubtless, it is a feat of high modernism, displaying a trademark love of interior exploration…
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‘Under the Feet of Jesus’ by Helena María Viramontes: A Sentimental Chicanx Bildungsroman
Helena Maria Viramontes is a widely anthologised Chicanx author and professor of English at Cornell University. A key figure in the literary community, her work is a major feature of the Latinx cannon and widely read in circles outside of the traditional (often color- and gender-washed) vein. Born in East LA in the 1950s, Viramontes’ work is a reflection of the social…
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Motherhood Flawed and the Destabilization of the Suburban Myth: Celeste Ng’s ‘Little Fires Everywhere’
Clad in a thin robe and her son’s sneakers, Elena Richardson stands on the lawn watching as every remnant of her perfectly planned life turns to ash. Her three children contemplatively observe as firemen extinguish the charred remains of their childhood home. Arranged in neat row on the hood of a car, they are acutely aware of the problematic fact…
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Jesmyn Ward’s ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’: Riding in Cars with Ghosts
Jesmyn Ward is a poet who writes novels. The lyricism of her prose starkly contrasts the gritty realism of her plots, but that is part of the joy of reading her. Her novels hold a gilded mirror to life’s imperfections. Her characters live in a world where murder can be termed as a “hunting accident” so long as the victim…
