Isaiah Cunningham and Jeff Biggers

Disturbing the Bones Is a Thriller with Big Things on Its Mind

By John Griswold

All narratives might be said to have other things on their minds than what they show us directly. Andrew Davis’s and Jeff Bigger’s novel has a lot on its mind too, which might be summed up as a desire to save the world. Yes, the bad guys’ evil plot to destroy Chicago and international diplomacy must be foiled, but the book is also thinking about threats such as nuclear proliferation and the impossibility of “fail-safe” precautions, racism, historicide, and America’s cultural divide.

Essays

Everybody Must Get Stoned

By Patrick Burke

“the philosophy of modern song” doesnt have a conclusion so i guess this review can do without one too . . . if the stuff i just mentioned sounds appealing id recommend the book but otherwise not . . . thanks and much obliged.

Uncategorized | Reviews

Two Cheers for the Hollywood Sports Movie

By Jake W. Dean

Part film critique and part political pondering, Grant Wiedenfeld’s Hollywood Sports Movies and the American Dream provides not just a compelling case for the importance of pop culture (and more specifically the sports film) in the imaginary of the American nation, but also of how the collective experience of watching these movies can be its own form of civic engagement.

Reviews

How the Candyman Films Examine the White Savior Complex and Exploitation Through Art and Collective Trauma

By Alethea Franklin

The “Candyman” films have a vision for their critiques of exploitative art. For those overcoming experiences with trauma, art immortalizes both pain and healing. These films have messages to tell the world about both, but they also want to have messages about many things.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

When the Wheel Came Off 

By Chris King

The truck’s left rear wheel came entirely off the vehicle, which then scraped to a stop on its naked rotor. My passenger noticed this phenomenon at the same moment, then we watched what followed in silent but shared wonder.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

The Frangible Beauty of Ceramics

By John Griswold

The resemblances of ceramics with human life are poignant. People too get fired in the kilns of experience, and often we emerge flawed or get broken in time. Some are dun, some glazed or crazed, some repaired with stripes of gold. We are all sensuous as pots.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Why Can We Not Admit That the 1990s Was The Greatest Decade?

By Ben Fulton

We seem unable to acknowledge the greatness of the 1990s not because we cannot remember its halcyon spirit but because we refuse to.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Time is the Book That Lets Us Endure Our Fate

By John Griswold

As with our lives, we must savor the enduring, through time.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Small Things Like These is Christmas Forever Imagined

By Ben Fulton

‘Small Things Like These’ neither lifts the heart nor breaks it. Instead, it is a quiet story suspended in the hopes of what Christmas might mean in years to come—and could mean now, this very year, if and when we find courage enough to search for it.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Of Vacation

By John Griswold

If fate gave me a job so well-fitted that when I take time off I do most of what I would do anyway, why bother with vacation?

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

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