From Our Pages: “Dale Flynn’s Blood,” memoir by D. J. Lee.
Trouble next door. “I pushed away and we stood in the soft wet dirt of the shoulder, staring at one another. Suddenly, he lunged forward …” D. J. Lee’s searing memoir of bullying, aspiration, and teenaged hormones appeared in BROAD STREET’s “Bedeviled” issue in winter/spring 2015. It has been praised for its gritty portrayal of anger...
“Corniche”: along sea and city, Beirut 2004. By Amira Pierce.
Sea and city: Beirut 2004. By Amira Pierce. In a city with few public parks, the Corniche Beirut is a perfect gathering place, a seaside promenade open to everyone. It’s where big luxury hotels meet everyday Lebanese, on broad walkways and dark rocks along the lapping Mediterranean. Today, as the sun sinks toward the water,...
From Our Pages: “Making Friends with Midge,” an essay on your best friend and Barbie’s. By Susann Cokal.
“Midge was, as all Mattel’s toys and books and marketing materials identified her, ‘Barbie’s Best Friend’— not simply herself. She never even had an essay written especially for her till now.” Spend some time palling around with Midge, Barbie’s best friend, and Barbie fan/scholar Susann Cokal. Besides being a literary critic, novelist, teacher, and Broad Street‘s editorial...
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...
Revisiting Don Belton’s “Voodoo for Charles”
This week we’ve been remembering the late writer Don Belton, in particular his essay “Voodoo for Charles,” a touching account of one uncle’s fears and muted hopes for his nephew in the face of overwhelming odds. Taken from a 1995 anthology edited by Belton, Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream, “Voodoo for Charles” tells the story of...
