astra-mag.com
209 articles0 followers
Hernan Diaz is making a career out of taking on some of the biggest archetypal American novels—the Western, and now the Wealth Novel.
The urgent and unsubtle horror of Gospodinov’s Time Shelter is that the present is grayed out, that there’s more past than future.
A behind-the-scenes look at the writing of Leslie Jamison’s essay “Dreamers in Broad Daylight: Ten Conversations” for the Ecstasy issue.
In Jhumpa Lahiri’s Translating Myself and Others, Julia Sanches finds a writer more interested in introspection than dialogue.
While many fans might consider Fiona Apple’s “Hot Knife” to be a lighthearted song, Steven Pfau finds it has a trenchant core.
Why must artistic traditions be siloed by region? Chinese Peruvian writer Julia Wong Kcomt discovers a sublime exception in the Cubist paintings of Wifredo Lam.
In her second novel, Paradais, Fernanda Melchor returns to familiar, brutal subject matter, but narrows in on fewer characters. The result is claustrophobic
In Paul Dalla Rosa’s story collection, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, Bobuq Sayed finds dramatic irony, alienation, and psychic depravity.
A novelist moves into a tumbledown Victorian terrace house. How do you make a home for yourself and your child, when the structure wants to spit you out?
Is Roxanne from A Goofy Movie a “total babe”?
The late-career style of painter Philip Guston, as seen through the eyes of a friend.
I click on links that lead to bootleg documentaries, Lady Gaga updates, and the ugliest clothes I have ever seen.
The bittersweet grapefruit, with its origins in error and mistaken identity, can alert us to unexpected ways of being with ourselves and others.
Joseph Ponthus and Imres Kertész are paragons of that rare breed of writer who can crystalize the beauty of life in the midst of mechanized death and horror.
I wanted to make a meme about how, after the release of The Novelist, Barnes & Noble would be like the Capitol on January 6.
When scrutinizing the father-daughter relationship, we rush to pathologize the daughter for her “Daddy Issues,” but what of the father’s “Daughter Issues”?
Andrew Ahn and Joel Kim Booster’s Fire Island satirizes the toxic hierarchies in the gay community, but does it go far enough?
International authors Mariana Enriquez, Mieko Kawakami, Leila Slimani, Katharina Volckmer, and Pola Oloixarac respond to America overturning Roe v. Wade
Is it possible to “do what you love” in the era of optimization and algorithms? In the film world, John Cassavetes (1929-1989) modeled how to be an
Decoding Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities felt impossible — until a poet in Vienna programmed a new version of the sprawling classic.
Watching the contestants on Love Is Blind and Married at First Sight, Crispin Long sees a glimmer of a past self.
“He sat on the bed watching me pack and said, in his slow, sleepy way: ‘You’re lucky you’re cute, ’cause a woman as heartless as you could have some bad luck.’”
In Lidia Yuknavitch’s Thrust, the reviewer finds a novel brushing up against the limits of its form.
Thuận’s Chinatown is sad, delightfully prickly, and a defiantly inscrutable act of resistance that insists that we make space for the things that don’t make
“And then there he was, like a ghost, smiling at me from under the clear solution.”
Writers in the Vietnamese diaspora are too eager to signal ethnic authenticity. Have we no shame?
French high jinks and Singani 63 cocktails. It’s not quite as clever as it thinks it is, but equally, not nearly as annoying as it sounds.
When you live far away, sometimes it can seem like the people you love are aging in fast-forward.
As a child, Lee Lai resented stories and art that only offered a rosy view of the world. Picture books by Shaun Tan offered a more daring, honest vision.
Zain Khalid’s debut novel wrestles with the urge to shatter the coherent world and examine its parts, and the desire to reconcile reality to narrative.
