2019
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Guestbook: Ghost Stories
Leanne Shapton
I really like this book in theory, as a collection of eerie vignettes that explore different hauntings through photos and ephemera. But while it’s enjoyably creepy, eventually the hints and suggestions of ghosts fell short for me. It makes sense in a way that the specters feel just out of reach, but the sections where the images were...more
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Magical Negro
Morgan Parker
from “A Brief History of the Present”
… I worry sometimes
I will only be allowed a death story. No one will say in
the New Yorker how my mother made her money, who
I married, how my career began. Your people. The death …
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The Clothesline Swing
Ahmad Danny Ramadan
Beautiful, elegiac. A play on the concept of Arabian Nights/One Thousand and One Nights, Hakawati takes the role of Scheherazade; many years past (close to the reader’s present) he was a Syrian refugee, a gay man who first experienced violence due to his identity and later due to the brutality of war. But he escaped...more