T Clutch Fleischmann asks: But Is It An Essay?
The past few months we’ve been following T Clutch Fleischmann’s blog over at The Kenyon Review, where, in a series of posts titled “But is it an essay?”, Fleischmann has assembled a collection of genre-bending or otherwise esoteric texts: Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist is Present” performance, staged at the Museum of Modern Art, in which...
The Real Lolita
Here at Broad Street we love reading about the true-life stories that have inspired some of our favorite fiction. That’s why we recommend a recent piece over at Hazlitt investigating the 1948 abduction of Sally Horner, a New Jersey fifth-grader whose kidnapping at the hands of Frank La Salle, along with the trip Horner made...
Illusion and Reality in Art
by Carla Dominguez There are two main schools of thought about illusions in creative work—schools that often are in opposition. First, there is a general belief that illusion is essential to art. At the same time, it is also generally accepted that creative works, whether it be writing, visual or performance, are an essential part of truth. It’s...
Ander Monson’s “I Have Been Thinking About Snow”
With the arrival of colder weather, we here at Broad Street have been thinking about winter, and by extension, Ander Monson’s delicate lyric essay “I Have Been Thinking About Snow,” from his collection Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, the 2007 winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. The form of Monson’s essay is defined by a preponderance of ellipsis, criss-crossing...
Reading About Misery
by Carla Dominguez Misery lit is a strange genre. The term, ostensibly coined by The Bookseller magazine in the late 2000s, is used to describe biographical literature mostly concerned with the protagonists’ triumph over personal trauma or abuse. Although misery lit as a genre encompasses many types of traumatic stories, the most common storyline is about someone’s life as a child: children with...
