New Work by Contributor Maggie Messitt
Check out new work by Broad Street contributor Maggie Messitt, whose essay “Ukufa” appears in our current issue, Hunt, Gather. In “North 20°54, West 156°14,” newly posted at the Bending Genre blog, Messitt traces the mystery of a disappeared aunt through a series of maps, both real and virtual. Surveying the maps tacked to her...
“In Defiance of Genre: on Octavia Butler,” by Jamal Stone.
by Jamal Stone Kindred, Octavia Butler’s 1979 best-seller, defies genre conventions. It is an intensely emotional novel that blends elements of sci-fi time travel with an antebellum first-person slave narrative. The novel takes African American protagonist Dana back to slave times at seemingly random intervals, leaving her to survive in a cruel world as she tries...
Truth by Lying
At the banquet for his Nobel Prize for literature in 2003, J.M. Coetzee, author of Foe, mused about truth and authorship. He recalled the moment in his childhood where he realized that Robinson Crusoe was not, in fact, written by Robinson Crusoe. Then, rather than delivering the traditional lecture, Coetzee told a strange story in which he claimed...
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher in Newfound Journal
This week, Broad Street recommends a dreamlike collage essay by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher (whose piece in the “Hunt, Gather” issue recently was called “superb” in a review by New Pages). In “Artifacts,” published in the current issue of Newfound Journal, Fletcher offers an intimate, impressionistic portrait of his mother, who we see in a series of snapshots of...
Literature, Emptiness and Empathy
It is a popular opinion that literature promotes empathy in the reader. Author John Green says in his Crash Course video “How and Why We Read,“By understanding language, you will have a fuller understanding of lives other than your own.” In the above video, author Azar Nafisi agrees, asking the question at the 2014 American Library Association Annual...
