Lisa Birk

Let us suppose that an era comes, an era of undetermined length, where words come unmoored from meaning. A word like “compassionate” say....

In the foyer of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson hung maps. All the continents are there, Africa, Asia and so on, cartographed as they were...

We are in tumultuous times and it is easy to dismiss art, music, writing, maybe particularly writing fiction, as a luxury. I think it is...

We write about the other with varying degrees of rigor and success. Homer’s default was narrow (white, male, hetero, warrior), but even...

This spring I nearly declared a moratorium on violent fiction after reading three savage novels: The Orphan Master’s Son, The Sympathizer...

Fail Faster, Succeed Quicker The first time I saw “Fail faster, succeed quicker,” I was at an MIT robotics convention. Don’t ask. The...

The Da Vinci Code is fast paced, a “page-turner.” Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is not. We don’t need Writer’s Digest to define...

At the center of Emily Ross’s YA thriller Half in Love with Death is Caroline. Caroline is the dreamy middle child, younger sister of...

The day Peyton Honeycutt gets his first period it’s a near calamity. Peyton was born female but is a boy. He holes up in the girls’...

We are awash in narrative. It arrives on every platform in ever-shorter form. (A Little Life not withstanding.) Which has me wondering,...