Hothouse
Literary Journal
Category: Reviews
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Written by Kiran Gokal Junot Diaz, the Dominican-American author of renowned books This Is How You Lose Her and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, recently released a children’s book called Islandborn which focuses on six-year-old Lola, an Afro-Caribbean girl who came over to the United States so young that she has no memories…
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Written by Kylie Warkentin While I stood in line on the night of February 28th waiting to be let into Hogg Auditorium for the American Shakespeare Center’s performance of Macbeth, Dr. Cullingford, a University Distinguished Teaching Professor and the Chair of the English Department, luxuriously slinked down the line asking after her Oxford Program students.…
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Written by Katelyn Connolly Migritude is a text obsessed with movement. The content of Shailja Patel’s striking work of poetic theatre, first staged in 2006 and published in book form in 2010, is a meditation on the history, politics, and emotion of migration. Her story moves across Africa, Europe. and North America. Its form is…
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Written by Kylie Warkentin I read Lynn Steger Strong’s piece, “Why I Wanted to Write About Anger,” on my phone in the small, suffocating apartment my grandmother owns. It feels less like a piece about anger, and more like what would result from a swell of resentment bitten off at the start once you’ve reminded…
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Written by Carolina Eleni Theodoropoulos Jac Jemc’s new novel, The Grip of It, is a story of a haunted house and the couple within it. At her reading during the Texas Book Festival, Jemc spoke about using the haunted house trope as a metaphor for the couple’s deeply rooted problems. The more they are disturbed by…
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Written by Abby Adamo For over a decade, Joan Didion’s name has been synonymous with grief. First with A Year of Magical Thinking in 2005 and then in 2011 with Blue Nights, Didion writes of the unthinkable tragedy of losing her husband and then—within the same year—her daughter as well. In the Netflix original documentary,…
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Written by Carolina Eleni Theodoropoulos A couple of weekends ago at the Texas Book Festival, Karen Shepard presented her new collection, Kiss Me Someone, while in conversation with Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! Shepard spoke heavily about the responsibility she feels as a writer to cultivate compassion for characters that sometimes appear monstrous.
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Written by Angie Carrera As a contemporary reader, when one hears the word “complicated,” it is natural to assume that someone is speaking of their newly changed relationship status, because everything in the twenty-first century is deemed “complicated.” British classicist Emily Wilson wrestled with this word and took into great consideration its social nuances and…
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Written by Brandi Carnes Rupi Kaur’s latest release, The Sun and Her Flowers, is only the second book in the young writer’s career, but it’s already among the most popular works on the shelves. Kaur’s explosive career, along with similar writers such as Atticus and Lang Leav, are at the forefront of a literary revolution.…
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Written by John Calvin Pierce “English is more peculiar among its relatives…in what has happened to it grammar than in what has happened to its vocabulary” (XII). The story of English and how it has lost a “perplexingly vast amount of grammar” is the main concern of John McWhorter’s book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The…
Hothouse 