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How a Cambridge graduate transformed a single summer’s day into a masterpiece of adolescent truth In the landscape of contemporary literary fiction, few debut novels manage to capture the delicate intersection of grief, adolescence, and the weight of a single day quite like Alice Chadwick’s Dark Like Under. This debut has been making waves in…
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I used to have three uninterrupted hours every morning to create. My desk was pristine, my supplies organized by colors, my creative practices as consistent as breathing. Then I became a mother, and suddenly my art felt like a luxury I could no longer afford. The transition hit me like a train. Where I once…
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There’s something sacred about the hours before the world wakes up. In that space between sleep and the day’s demands, I’ve discovered a ritual that doesn’t just start my morning—it resets my entire creative being. As creatives, we’re constantly pouring ourselves out. We give our ideas, our energy, our very essence to our work, often…
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Imagine being a Black woman writer in 1900, watching white authors profit from stories about their people while getting every detail wrong. What would you do? Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins didn’t just complain—she picked up her pen and wrote the stories herself, creating some of the most powerful and unapologetically Black literature of her time. She…
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Have you ever been told you had to pick a side? That you couldn’t be all of who you are because it makes other people uncomfortable? That your complexity—your refusal to fit neatly into someone else’s box—is somehow the problem? In 1892, a brilliant Black woman named Anna Julia Cooper stood before a room full…
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I used to be a speed reader. Not by choice, mind you, but by necessity. College demanded it—racing through dense theoretical texts, skimming for key concepts, highlighting frantically before exams. This habit became so ingrained that reading became less about understanding and more about consuming. Books became checkboxes on endless syllabi, their spines accumulating like…
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Book Review: The Underground Library In times of crisis, what matters most? Jennifer Ryan’s The Underground Library suggests that sometimes the answer is as simple and as radical as ensuring people have access to stories. Set during the London Blitz, this novel transforms the familiar narrative of wartime heroism into something more intimate and revolutionary:…
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Book Review: South Dakota’s Mathis Murders: Horror In The Heartland Some crimes are so shocking that they become part of a state’s collective memory, whispered about in coffee shops and remembered at family gatherings decades later. The 1981 Mathis murders in South Dakota is one such case. Noel Hamiel’s South Dakota’s Mathis Murders: Horror In…
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Book Review: The Secret History There’s something intoxicating about watching beautiful people make terrible choices. Donna Tartt understands this impulse perfectly when writing The Secret History, a novel that seduces readers into complicity with its morally bankrupt characters while simultaneously horrifying us with their actions. Published in 1992, Tartt’s novel remains a masterpiece in storytelling…
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Picture this: It’s 1840, and in a Boston parlor, a woman with piercing eyes and an even sharper mind is holding everyone’s attention. She’s asking questions that make the refined ladies shift uncomfortably in their chairs. What if women could be more than wives and mothers? What if we stopped apologizing for our ambitions? What…
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Kat McAdaragh 