31 Days of Stories 2021: Why read short stories?
Stories require attention and concentration and often yield their meanings only over time, or in retrospect. But the best stories reward vigilance and repeated reading.
“I try to avoid labels”: Jeff VanderMeer on his new novel, ecological disaster, and why he won’t run for public office
Nominally a hardboiled noir, Hummingbird Salamander is also a cri de coeur about our current ecological crisis.
No future, or, the submerged punk ethos of Susan Sanford Blades’s Fake It So Real
In these tales of mothers, daughters, fathers, and lovers, punk is more attitudinal than aural or political.
Novelist Kim Echlin ventures into dark territory in Speak, Silence, a Bosnia-set novel about rape as a war crime
“For 2,000 years or more, women in literature have been represented as the spoils of war,” says Echlin about one impression she wanted to correct by writing this novel.
Union push at Amazon fails, company denies intimidation tactics
The implications of the vote go to the heart of the difficulties in standing up to major corporations while promoting worker safety and humane working conditions.
What’s in a name? Alexandra Andrews’s debut investigates literary fame and duplicity
Who Is Maud Dixon? is about ambition, identity, and the malleable nature of personality.
March 26 declared a day of solidarity for Amazon workers trying to unionize
The COVID-19 pandemic has enriched the world’s billionaires while workers on the front lines are forgotten or exploited.
The anxiety of influencers: Ellery Lloyd’s Instagram mommy thriller People Like Her
The twisty, fast-paced debut effectively skewers online culture while telling a tense story about a family threatened from within and without.
Woman returns overdue library book sixty-three years later; TPL to begin phasing out overdue fines
A library branch in Queens found a book in the mail with a due date of July 10, 1957.
Large, socially distanced crowd forms line to support S.W. Welch bookstore and other small businesses in Montreal’s Mile End
The protest arose in opposition to what is perceived as predatory rent evictions by powerful realtors and landlords.