Angela Therese Mathew

Whenever I re-read The God Of Small Things, its fluent irony and inventive metaphors feel timeless. Roy’s artful satire, while far more subtle than the humorous political culture of the internet, has a similar quality of drawing you in and making you think about why you are chuckling in the first place.

"The Rabbit Hutch" reveals the soul of a post-industrial Midwestern town through it's polyphonic narratives but is not a story with a definitive resolution. Particularly with Blandine’s arc, there is a tantalizing cliffhanger that I was wondering about for nearly half of the book that was ultimately left up to interpretation. However, to read “The Rabbit Hutch” is not to interrogate the relevance of each chapter but to savor its poetic prose and marinate in Tess Gunty’s intriguing ideas about Catholicism, effective altruism, orphanhood and the extraction economy.

“Americanah” is a sprawling love story that follows protagonist Ifemelu as she grows up in Nigeria and then comes to the United States for college. When Ifemelu “ hungered to understand everything about America, to wear a new, knowing skin right away: to support a team at the Super Bowl, understand what a Twinkie was and what sports ‘lockouts’ meant” I really resonated with her.

Earlier this month, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi doubled down on enforcing the 'hijab and chastity' law. Wearing the veil was made compulsory after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, which resulted in the overthrowing of Iran’s corrupt Pahlavi monarchy. However, over time, the law stopped being strictly enforced and there was more tolerance for women choosing the kind of the veil they wanted to wear.

Elaine Hsieh Chou described her 2022 novel, “Disorientation,” as the story of what happens when “a student who is clueless about race finds out the most racist secret at her school.” Ingrid Yang is a 29-year-old Taiwanese-American PhD student who has spent nine years writing a dissertation on Xiao Wen-Chou, the (fictional) “father of Chinese-American poetry” who had died a few years earlier.

Anne Carson, who will be visiting to speak on campus on Wednesday and Thursday this week, is a Canadian poet, translator and professor. Her writing often includes literary allusions, especially from ancient Greek and Latin works. Seeing posters for her “History of Skywriting” talk all around campus, I didn’t think I had ever heard of her before. Without realizing it, however, I had been encountering her work for months — on Twitter.