People & Places

Fannie Hurst

Unforgetting Fannie Hurst

By William J. Maxwell

From one angle, at our hundred-year distance, Hurst’s schmaltzy naturalism makes her a kind of art monster in reverse: not a great avant-gardist with noxious politics and a track record of abuse, but a respectably woke voice, responsibly raised for some of the right intersectional causes, with an unforgivably corny style. From another, equally telling angle, however, Hurst’s work nowadays looks like some of the most cannily effective proletarian literature ever produced in the United States.

People & Places | Essays

Into the Tallow End

By Ben Fulton

“Tallow.” Say it carefully even once or twice and we notice instantly its phonetic advantage over the word “lard,” which sounds suspiciously like “lord” but falls just one vowel short of such esteem because no one would like to think of using God’s name in vain, much less as something we might cook with.

People & Places | Dispatches

Our Current Saga of Eggs

By Ben Fulton

For the resourceful and the resilient, there will always be something else to eat for breakfast. Still, how interesting would it be if we let the high price of eggs direct our thoughts and actions beyond the simple matter of cost?   

People & Places | Dispatches

Skip to content