Over two decades ago, Michel Rabagliati first introduced his close friends and family to Paul — a teenage boy growing up in Montreal in the 1970s. Paul was Rabagliati’s creation: a comic that illustrated childhood, first loves, his first apartment and even divorce. The tender snapshots of daily life packed with cultural references and rich … Read more
The narrator of Eliza Barry Callahan’s “The Hearing Test” is an artist in her late twenties named Eliza who lives in New York City. She wakes up one morning in August with a buzz in her ear that’s accompanied by the sound of “perpetually rolling thunder.” “It’s like God adjusting his piano stool but never … Read more
A novel with the title “Martyr!” arrives on the scene preloaded and explosive. The word is fraught, even more so now than when the book’s author, the Iranian American poet Kaveh Akbar, chose it. There’s humor in the exclamation mark, but there’s something else, too. It signals that Akbar is fascinated with words in action, … Read more
In 2021, Jack Chadwick, a twenty-seven-year-old barman and part-time go-go dancer, was browsing the shelves of the Working Class Movement Library, outside Manchester, when he spied an arresting book cover. The hand-drawn illustration showed a skeleton kneeling in supplication, its arms outstretched. Chadwick knew of neither the book, “Caliban Shrieks,” nor its writer, Jack Hilton. … Read more
