Books

MARLOWE DOBBE Tillie Walden’s debut graphic memoir Spinning is a sprawling, elegiac bildungsroman of angst, grief, love, and lust—not bad for an 18-year-old. Walden’s book, like her life, is framed through the prism of competitive figure skating, which provided both punishment and structure throughout her youth. Ahead of her Wordstock appearance, Walden discussed her approach […]

MARLOWE DOBBE At this year’s Wordstock, Chicago essayist Megan Stielstra will be in town to discuss her new collection of essays, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life. The Mercury sat down with Stielstra ahead of the festival to talk writing, our country’s current political hellscape, and what she’s going to do once she gets […]

MARLOWE DOBBE “Clearly, there is something about poetry that rattles and mystifies people, that puts them off, that makes them feel as if there is something wrong,” writes Matthew Zapruder in Why Poetry, a book that seeks to change this sentiment. Conceived as a welcome mat to those who feel lost when presented with a […]

MARLOWE DOBBE In the years following the Civil War, when Southern Blacks had been freed of their chains and began to enter the political and social sphere, South Carolina incrementally sought ways to disenfranchise and halt the mobility of its African American population. At his state’s constitutional convention in 1895, South Carolina Congressman Thomas Miller—an […]

BEX FINCH “This is not a book about marriage or family, both because I respect my loved ones’ private lives, and because I am very selfish,” John Hodgman writes at the beginning of Vacationland. “This is a book about me, at what I hope is the beginning of the second half of my life and […]