Dystopian futurism for our times.

On her new album with Nicole Mitchell, EarthSeed, inspired by Octavia Butler’s prescient series of Afrofuturist Parables.

A uniquely vile cast of characters, ecological disaster, and a motherless daughter who finds strength in the unexpected.

What about this? Across Syrian sands the wham of Nebuchadnezzar’s / canonical trumpets presaged an unlikely partner

The writer on her memoir about complications with the church, navigating romantic longing, and doing things on her terms.

On Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, a witty and subversive novel about life in a fourteenth century convent.

As we entered Arezzo, the guide pointed out the prostitutes lining the road. The women looked like awkward, flashy birds, teetering in bright spandex and spiked heels, cheap gold jewelry flashing in the summer sun.

Hope at the point of despair; doubt at the point of hope.

The novelist on her loss of faith, youth culture, cult leaders, and spending time with syllables. 

When I was thirteen, two missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came to the house to follow up on a conversation from the week before with my mother. 

Picture an area the size of Manhattan covered in sand. It rises and falls and disappears.

“Literature is a way of establishing the humanness of others. It’s interested in the relationships between people, between authenticity and truth. That in itself has to make us better disposed to each other.”

Freeing Joan of Arc from her Catholic trappings in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan

If novelists could tell the story of climate change, they might spark the action scientists are calling for in order to save the planet.

“I don’t accept the idea of my history as tragic.”

“Hippias Minor is such a handy introduction to Socrates as a personality, to this method of argumentation, to the culture of Athens where you have all these hot-shot foreign speakers like Hippias coming in and making the intellectual fermentation even stronger.”

On Michel Houellebecq’s Submission

“Post-love, post-work, post-faith, post-home. What’s left?”

Margaret Morton reports that on her first long drive through the mountains of Kyrgyzstan she was delighted when a skyline of minarets and domes appeared out of the silvery-blue, thin, stone-dry air, like a mirage.

Compassion, religion, and secrets in a North Dakota boom town.