The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review

Using Zoom while living under the Covid-19 quarantine caused me to face something that I don’t face most of the time: my face. There it was, always looking back at me from my laptop screen. Even when I’m brushing my teeth or shaving, I only scan portions of it to make sure I don’t leave toothpaste or stubble on my chin. For the most part, it’s a perfectly fine face, I suppose. Granted, it’s not…

Why The Great Gatsby Fails and The Things They Carried Succeeds: War and Love in the Eleventh Grade Classroom

I know from teaching literature to teenagers for a generation that this latest bunch are not naturally romantic, and so the earnest attitude that typifies modernist American literature can be a tough sell. The raw poignant cynicism of the current pop cultural rights of passage, like Breaking Bad or Orange is the New Black, is much more to their taste these days than, say, The Great Gatsby.…

SELFIE INTERVIEW | Jeffrey H. MacLachlan

Jeffrey H. MacLachlan also has recent work in New Ohio Review, Columbia Journal, the minnesota review, among others. He teaches literature at Georgia College & State University. He can be followed on Twitter @jeffmack. Eckleburg: What captures your interest most in your work, now, as a reader of your work? Jeffrey H. MacLachlan: Jessa Crispin recently said that good literary work requires the…

If a Tree Falls in the Forest It Will Always Make a Sound

A tall, lush, evergreen forest. The sound of an airplane flying overhead. Bird calls echoing through the forest. Moss sleeves on tree branches. Moss coats on trunks. Massive ferns at their feet. A long dirt trail. The sound of boots walking on the path. Maple leaves scattered all over. The occasional heavily-graffitied sign. Twigs. There’s water in the distance. There’s a valley. Many fallen…

Forget It | Recommended by Mercury-Marvin Sunderland

Forget It by Anastacia Renee Anastacia Renee is a wonderful queer Black woman poet from Seattle who I had the great pleasure of being briefly mentored by in high school. Her work focuses on experimental poetry that uses symbols such / as \ this __ (.) She uses these methods to capture her lived experiences, culture, and traumas as a queer Black woman, in heart-wrenching, beautiful ways. She shows…

SELFIE INTERVIEW | Mercury-Marvin Sunderland

Mercury-Marvin Sunderland (he/him) is a transgender autistic gay man with Borderline Personality Disorder. He’s from Seattle and currently attends the Evergreen State College. He’s been published by University of Amsterdam’s Writer’s Block, UC Davis’ Open Ceilings, UC Riverside’s Santa Ana River Review, UC Santa Barbara’s Spectrum, and The New School’s The Inquisitive Eater. His lifelong dream is…

Milkman | Recommended by Kevin Grauke

Milkman by Anna Burns I love a novel that expects you to immerse yourself fully into its world, especially when it’s nothing like your own, as this one does.  I also love a novel with a voice so strong that it temporarily takes control of your thoughts like a virus. Milkman‘s world is Northern Ireland during The Troubles, and its voice belongs to an eighteen-year-old woman doing her best to…

Diagnosis Day and Tackling Cancer “Head On”—Pun Intended

When I was first told I had brain cancer, I felt…well, numb. It was like my heart actually stopped beating. I am an incredibly sensitive person. I’m actually considered to have a “hyper-sensitive personality.” Hence, I can cry at the drop of a hat. There is not one single Disney movie where I haven’t at least shed a tear or two. Hearing that word “cancer” I cried, but unlike ever before. The…

Visiting Hours in the Multiverse

November 26, 2013 11:03 a.m. My younger brother and I are sitting in the waiting room at Arbour Hospital in Jamaica Plain, hoping to talk with Mom during visiting hours, but she’s refusing to meet and blames us for being a captive in this mental hospital, in this world, at this time. We want her to receive help, but she unfortunately doesn’t believe she needs any. Time in a mental hospital feels…

Lux Lisbon, On the Roof Again

Lux Lisbon’s on the roof again. She crawls out every night. She went up day one, smoking cloves after sex, and the neighbor boys watch through their telescope. Few books worm into my brain as Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides does. I first read it in the months after college graduation. My friend Charlotte and I didn’t want our minds to waste, and collectively we’d amassed a number of books…

A few weeks ago, as I walked through the front door of the detox house I’m a medical assistant at, I noticed what appeared to be a familiar character languishing on his old couch haunt, but I couldn’t be sure, as he was listless and downcast, and our eyes did not meet. He was all alone in the family room while the other handful of patients were huddled in the kitchen, murmuring amongst themselves…

Left Over Orphans and Farm Animals Are Good to Keep in Your Wagon

She’s voter polling me for Arizona and the next election. I tell her “I agree…” when I say I believe in immigration leading to citizenship and I want to put more money into education and marihuana laws. I tell her I take care of my mother and I make $3.50 an hour and she asks me if it’s true. I couldn’t make this sob story up, I tell her. I want to scream I’M A QUEER FEMINIST ACTIVIST AND POET…

The Emperor’s New Clothes and The Fashionistas of Contemporary Art

Art today is governed by aesthetic anarchy regulated and overseen by a Babel of critics whose observations are, as Barnett Newman pointed out, “as useful to an artist as ornithology is to a bird.” The revolution began years ago when academic technique, fidelity to nature, and “beauty” were abandoned in favor of subjective, even solipsist, vision. The viewer now relies on critics to reveal what in…

Don’t Make Me Turn This Car Around: How Fighting with My Brother Helped Me Understand French Philosophy

After attending school for many, many, many years, I have come to the realization that some of the theory I have been assigned to read can be applied at home—my childhood home. It has occurred to me that I haven’t given my parents enough credit concerning the methodology of discipline and punishment experienced by my brother and me by them (primarily my mother).1 Studying the work of Michel…

SELFIE INTERVIEW | AJ Colombo

Amy Colombo has MFAs in Photography from the University of Delaware and Creative Writing from West Virginia University. She also received a Ph.D in Media, Art, and Text from Virginia Commonwealth University. During the Covid stay-at-home mandate she has learned how to install a bathroom vanity, a thermostat, and various light fixtures. Her next project involves replacing a smoke…

A Bendel Bonnet, A Shakespeare Sonnet

What do a Bendel bonnet and a Shakespeare sonnet have in common besides rhyme? Throw in Mickey Mouse. No, it’s not a riddle manqué or a question rejected by the Miller Analogies test. As many probably know already, these are just a few of the superlative attributes applied to the person who is nonpareil in Cole Porter’s 1934 song “You’re the Top.” In fact, the list of best-in-kind comparisons…

SELFIE INTERVIEW | Michael Colbert

Michael Colbert loves horror films (his favorites are Candyman and Silence of the Lambs) and coffee (his favorites are Ethiopian and Costa Rican). He’s an MFA candidate in fiction at UNC Wilmington, and his writing appears or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Atlas Obscura, and Barrelhouse, among others. Eckleburg: What captures your interest most in your work, now, as a reader of your work? Michael…