Literary Journal
Written by Guadalupe Rodriguez This is how it all starts: it’s the first time that you see yourself. And it’s not just like seeing yourself in the mirror when you wake up in the mornings or when you take a shower in the evenings. It’s not like when you notice you have your mother’s hair…
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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…
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Written by Luis De La Cruz “Love and life / interested me so / that I dared to knock / at the Door of the Cosmos…” –“Door of the Cosmos,” Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Myth Science Solar Arkestra The relationship between jazz and poetry is incontrovertible. Major figures in the American poetic tradition have engaged…
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Written by Julia Schoos “What difference did Stesichorus make?” asks Anne Carson in the beginning of Autobiography of Red (3). For years, Geryon’s story lived in the mouth of the people focusing solely on Herakles and his journey, with Geryon merely an hurdle to be overcome during his labors. First and foremost a creation of…
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Written by Dan Kolinko When Lisa L. Moore thinks about the Pope, she thinks about an isle of lesbos. On her office door is a photo of a cartoon cat with a tagline that reads: “Ask me about my office gun policy.” Moore is a professor at UT and a literary critic whose main focus…
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Fanny Fern wrote as if the Devil was in her—or so spoke Nathaniel Hawthorne. Born 1811 as Sarah Willis, Fanny Fern was the first female newspaper columnist in the United States, and by 1855, the highest-paid columnist of the 19th century. However, while her contemporaries Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson are considered household names, Fern’s name is almost shrouded in obscurity. Why?
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Written by Delia Davis On Thursday, the Swedish Academy awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature to Japanese-born British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. “In novels of great emotional force,” wrote the academy, Ishiguro “has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” Ishiguro’s oeuvre includes novels, screenplays, short stories, and even lyrics. Some of his more prominent…
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Many Native American artists commemorate their history and heritage through the creation of beautiful paintings, tapestries, pottery, woven baskets, jewelry, literature and many other forms of art. Today, the Hothouse staff celebrates the following Native American writers and their works. N. Scott Momaday Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday’s Again the Far Morning is a combination…
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