Elias Altman
WE’RE IN THE HOLYOKE MALL, and I need to go to the bathroom. Although the divorce is not so recent, some activities with my father still stretch him beyond his inclinations or means, usually both, which he devises to suit my older brother and me to make up for “it.” Shopping at the video-game store […] 
POET AND LITERARY CRITIC Jamie Hood’s Trauma Plot: A Life is a destabilizing achievement of radical self-exposure, interrogation of form, and defiance of reader expectation. Setting out to capture what it’s like to live through sexual violence and its aftershocks, the memoir records all the pain, the horror, the numbness; the forgetting and remembering and […] 
IN EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM Hannah Arendt calls the transcript of the SS officer’s police examination “a veritable gold mine for a psychologist—provided he is wise enough to understand that the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny.” The ludicrous is perhaps easy enough to imagine; the humor hinges on Eichmann’s “heroic fight with […]