#tajja

How White Men Became Less Central to Tajja Isen’s Writing

High school English didn’t ask much of us. We were assigned two books a year, one of them a Shakespeare play and the other short, cynical, and 20th century. Never anything later than the ’50s, as if literature had expired along with Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. We peered into stories like windows, not mirrors: Look at these people and their odd, brutal lives that are nothing like yours.…