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Back Draft: Emily Wilson
What’s the difference between “trouble” and “disaster”? For someone like Emily Wilson, it can mean everything. Fresh off her highly acclaimed translation of The Odyssey, one of The New York Times’...
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Back Draft: Miranda Popkey
Photograph by Elena Seibert Miranda Popkey’s debut novel, Topics of Conversation, traces ten significant encounters over twenty years, each of which shapes the unnamed female narrator’s views on...
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Back Draft: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Photograph by Nicholas Nichols, courtesy of Rachel Eliza Griffiths Mirrors are simple machines. Our relationship with them, however, is a thing of great complexity. They possess a haunting kind of...
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Back Draft: Emma McMillan
Artist Emma McMillan unearths the subjects for her paintings in archives. Reaching into the halls of the past, she uses her brush to achieve a kind of conversion, breathing new life into forgotten...
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Back Draft: Danez Smith
Poems and titles have a complicated relationship. Often the poem needs to be written before the right title reveals itself. But sometimes the title arrives first and must wait for the poem—and the...
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Back Draft: Lisa Dillman
When Lisa Dillman first encountered Spanish writer Andrés Barba’s work, his novels hadn’t yet been translated into English. Working together, the two would go on to translate and publish much of his...
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Back Draft: Clint Smith
Photograph by Carletta Girma History may be recorded in textbooks, but that’s not where it lives. Rather, it’s in the blood of the people who carry that history inside them, and the complex places...
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Back Draft: Bianca Stone and Ruth Stone
How should one speak of the dead? In hushed tones or a more boisterous register? In either case, the deceased insist on remaining present in our lives. “The past,” writes Emily Dickinson, “is not a...
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Back Draft: Sterling HolyWhiteMountain
College relationships sometimes go up in flames. In the case of Sterling HolyWhiteMountain’s short story, “Featherweight,” the breakup is particularly incendiary: “Allie cast me from her room, first...
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Back Draft: Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman
Ava, the grief-stricken protagonist of Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman’s novel The Very Nice Box, is an engineer at STÄDA — a kind of Ikea/Muji hybrid that produces everything from forks and spoons...
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Back Draft: Rebecca Donner
Rebecca Donner by Beowulf Sheehan Reading Rebecca Donner’s stunning nonfiction book, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, I felt like I was in the passenger seat of a car, trying to jam my foot on...
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Back Draft: Hala Alyan
Hala Alyan Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City is a work of tremendous propulsion, a sprawling tale that speeds the reader backward and forward in time. At the center of this novel is a family’s messy...
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Back Draft: Meghan O’Rourke
Meghan O'Rourke An award-winning memoirist, journalist, poet, and editor, Meghan O’Rourke is also an excellent teacher, which is how we met. A decade ago, I took O’Rourke’s MFA poetry course at New...
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Back Draft: Jiha Moon
Jiha Moon’s evocative, sumptuous paintings are dynamic meditations on cultural identity. Her Yellowave series invites viewers to reconsider the color yellow, with its supersaturated neons that spill...
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Back Draft: Corey Van Landingham
Poet Corey Van Landingham’s latest collection, Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens, takes direct aim at the powers that be. Her poems are especially pointed when examining the crumbling state of the...
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Back Draft: Ada Limón
There’s no shortage of poems about nature — pastorals that capture the beauty of landscapes, odes that pay tribute to the passage of the seasons. Less common, however, are poems that embody the dark...
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Back Draft: Hangama Amiri
Hangama Amiri is an Afghan Canadian artist whose fabric installations reflect and refract. Her life-sized tapestries, collected in “Bazaar, A Recollection of Home,” recreate apartment blocks and...
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Back Draft: Antoine Wilson
As novelist Clarice Lispector once put it, “I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own.” The sentiment could surely apply to countless novelists, though it’s especially fitting for Antoine...
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Back Draft: Charif Shanahan
All of us carry wounds in one form or another. Sometimes those wounds are visible to the people around us; sometimes they stay concealed. And sometimes the wound itself is a painful reflection of how...
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Back Draft: Javier Zamora
Every book consists of a kind of migration. It begins in one place and ends in another. Prior to publication, it also undergoes a journey of revision: the text must travel from its initial form to its...
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