Nina Potischman PO ’21 critiques Sarah Manguso’s “The Two Kinds of Decay” and the need to extract meaning from experiences of chronic illness.
Books
Read it and weep: On the limits of journaling and capturing adolescence
Nina Potischman PO ’21 reflects on journaling her adolescence alongside messages from Sarah Manguso’s “Ongoingness: The End of a Diary.”
In my book: The lovely fantasyland of bookstagram
Is it really so awful for a group of mostly female book-lovers to appreciate not just content, but also form?
In My Book: Knowing when to move on
There is a sad truth that all readers must, at some point, acknowledge: It’s impossible to read everything.
In My Book: The burnout blaze spreads to reading
Book burnout occurs when we let optimization tools such as speed reading bleed into the activity of reading books purely for personal enjoyment.
My lover waits between the sheets: On literary loves
I don’t often read Reddit, but a recent question-turned-confession titled “I think I’ve fallen in love with a fictional character” caught my attention: “I know people get crushes on fictional characters all the time, but this has gone beyond a crush. I’m infatuated with him. … [H]e’s the first thing
How novelty brings insane to the sane
Warning: This column contains spoilers. “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn begins: “When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. And what’s inside it. I think of that too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling
Oh God, not another bookmark: The six most awful gifts a reader can get
Reading is not often thought of as a particularly risky passion. Sure, you can argue that it expands your mind to dangerously new heights or that books are addictive. But overall, it’s a safer choice than, let’s say, skydiving, or training poisonous snakes, or recreating “Die Hard” car chase scenes.
Metaphors: Salvaging Our Relationships
I’m sitting at a mahogany table; it’s big and round and shrinks the classroom to half its real size. My classmates fill the spaces at the table’s circumference, listening, talking, pondering, ruminating. I have ideas brewing in my mind. But when I come to verbalize them, I fall short of
The shape-shifting magic of translated literature
It was “One Hundred Years of Solitude” that first made me sign up for Spanish classes in the sixth grade. I hadn’t even read Gabriel García Márquez’s landmark work yet. Really, I had only heard the first line: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía