Editorial Assistant Emily Rose Cole: There is little said in Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012) that I don’t wholeheartedly agree with. In fact, Ruefle’s meditations on craft put into words many truths I have always believed about poetry but could never fully articulate. In the essay “On Secrets,” for …
Editorial Assistant Austin Allen: Inger Christensen’s Alphabet (New Directions, 2001) is a book that made me hesitate at first, then won me over. Its inventive structure, based on the Fibonacci sequence (the number of lines in each section follow the pattern 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.), impressed me as both clever and challenging, …
Editorial Assistant Alex Evans: The realities of being a graduate student in creative writing are such that I have very little time to read outside of my coursework. However, for the past few months, I’ve been using whatever spare moments I can find to revisit some of my favorite novels and collections of the past few …
Editorial Assistant Sakinah Hofler: When I first saw my reading list for my Forms class, I noted the usual suspects—Woolf, Austen, Elliot, Zadie Smith—then I paused at one title, The Salt Line by Holly Goddard Jones. Knowing Jones from her collection of realistic stories (Girl Trouble), I was surprised by the first line of description …
When I first got an email from Barnes & Noble a few months ago announcing a new book from Joan Didion, I thought this was too good to be true. New work? From Didion, someone who I’ve described as my spirit animal? I was sold instantly, preordering a copy before I had a chance to …
This latest “What We’re Reading” post comes from volunteer Hannah Haney, a first-year masters student in Literary and Cultural Studies here at UC. When not reading through submissions and making insightful comments, Hannah likes to read good books, eat good food, and write bad poetry. She is also the Managing Editor of Relief Journal. We’re …
Suzie Vander Vorste: Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction is my current reading companion, and it’s a great one—full of brilliant short creative-nonfiction essays. It’s easy to flip this book open and land on a piece that enlarges one’s understanding of the art of story-telling, the act of self-reflection, and of the different perspectives on what …
Ryan Ruff Smith: Mavis Gallant is one of those realists who, upon close examination, is weirder than anyone. Excepting one ghost story, the material collected in Paris Stories, a retrospective assemblage put together by NYRB Classics in 2002, is strictly grounded in reality. For the most part, this is the reality of post-World War II Europe. …
Samantha Edmonds: When I offered to write a review of Jenny Offill’s novel Department of Speculation, what I really wanted to do was open up a forum to gush. It’s not every day I find a book that I don’t simply enjoy or even admire, but that moves something within me, as a reader, as …
Alex Smith: Hemingway once called Dawn Powell (sarcastically, perhaps) his favorite living writer, and Gore Vidal dubbed her “The American Writer.” She was, indeed, a contemporary and friend of many famous novelists of the mid-twentieth century. And yet her work is virtually unknown today. Hence my surprise upon reading Powell’s brilliant The Locusts Have No King, …
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