In “Washing in the Sangam,” Joshua Robbins writes, Son, through faith you’ve found this hunger answered even as I turn away in our ordinary house from the look of wonder in your face, the expression Christ must have had seeing Lazarus raised. His debut collection, Praise Nothing (University of Arkansas Press, 2013) is populated by this type of […]
We appear to be the happy operators of a menagerie! At a reading in Chicago on Tuesday, January 8th, an elderly gentleman concluded the night’s comments by saying that he had never heard of George Saunders until a few days earlier, but the New York Times’ review*’s claim was too substantial to deny. So, he […]
There is inside. Most of us spend most of our time there. There is usually something that separates that space from nature, which can often be cold, wet, or other forms of unpleasantness. Outside makes me feel small but not always in a bad way. Often both spaces are boring and normal, especially when the setting is mundane, […]
There are forces working for and against Kathryn Bigelow’s newest film, Zero Dark Thirty. For: The built-in emotional gravity that comes with a story surrounding the events of September 11th; Bigelow’s past success in a familiar Middle Eastern locale (a literal sandbox for her, to use a cheeky metaphor); her execution of the ideal action-thriller […]
There is an exchange in “Memento Mori,” the fourteenth episode of the fourth season of the X-Files, in which Dana Scully – FBI agent, medical doctor, redoubtable skeptic, possible alien abductee, conflicted Catholic, survivor of hundreds of losses and tragedies – breaks the news of her recently diagnosed cancer to her partner Fox Mulder by […]
