Into the mire!
I remember the fables that were told frequently in my youth, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf and The Hare and The Tortoise — passed down generation to generation to remind us not to lie and that slow and steady wins the race. If You Cross The River is a modern fable about the power […]
MoreGENDER INEQUALITY, SURVEILLANCE, homophobia, controlled birth rates, cranial digital chips – these sound dystopian, but also strangely familiar. How far are we actually from these developments in the United States? China had the one-child policy for decades, homophobia is existent worldwide, and women still have to fight for equal rights in almost every aspect of […]
MoreAS A MEMBER of our modern society, I can wholly identify with the urge to flee the confines of responsibility and technology to seek a freer life in nature. I quickly remember, however, that although I don’t have to go to work if I vanish into the forest, I would also have to give up […]
More“MY HUSBAND ASKED me to lie. Not a big lie. He probably didn’t even consider it a lie, and neither did I, at first . . .” This lie starts Angie Kim’s courtroom drama Miracle Creek, which explores the mystery of the sudden explosion of the Miracle Submarine– a facility that uses an 100% pressurized […]
More“Alabama, Arkansas,” the opening lines from the song “Home” by: Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros got stuck in my head while reading Genevieve Hudson’s short story collection, Pretend We Live Here. The song discusses finding home not in a place but in a person: “let me go home, home is wherever I am with […]
More“Trump still talking, still livestreaming, sailing above the unfolding devastation, justifying and raging, attacking his enemies, and then calling for a big strike, calling for it even as the internet was flickering out.” (P.105) MARK DOTEN DESCRIBES, in his new novel, all too realistically what the end of the world might look like. From the […]
MoreFANTASY IS THE genre that allows people to imagine a world without limits, a place to escape. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is Marlon James’ first book of his new Dark Star Trilogy. James’s previous novels called A Brief History Of Seven Killings and John Crow’s Devil, which explore many of the common themes present in […]
MoreThe Dinner List by Rebecca Serle We’ve all been there: Ice Breakers and get-to know you games, all posing the same question: if you could have dinner with someone, dead or alive, who would it be? Well, what if you could have dinner with five people? In Rebecca Serle’s The Dinner List, the main character […]
MoreIf you have ever tried to fit a story plot into a “dramatic arc” (According to the 19th century German novelist Gustav Freytag: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement) but failed, then you need to read Jane Alison’s book Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative. Alison’s book releases pressure from the traditional […]
MoreWE ALL HAVE crushes on actors. Think about the feeling of seeing them on TV or at the movies. You may to smile every time you think of them, but would you actually think you could date them? There’s a line between a dream in your fandom and real life, and we know that–except Kristina, […]
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The Mire 