Mount Holyoke’s own Professor Corinne Demas has done it again with her latest Young Adult novel, Returning to Shore. Not only is this story a tender coming of age story, it also speaks to the struggle of navigating daughter-parent relationships of all kinds. The novel opens with slightly naïve, teenage […]

Many pages of Jesse Ball’s new novel, Silence Once Begun, are open and airy with blank space. But to dismiss the brief book as insubstantial would do this intriguing narrative a disservice. Rather, as in poetry, Ball writes as if the spaces and silences are just as important as the […]

“Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself,” writes Rebecca Mead, in her new memoir, biography and literary homage, My Life in Middlemarch. […]

This past month, many Wellesley College students were disturbed by the apparent sight of a near-naked man sleepwalking just outside of their dormitories. Fortunately, he was just a hyperrealistic sculpture; Wellesley’s Davis Museum had installed a work by contemporary artist Tony Matelli to publicize an exhibition to controversial effect. In […]

In a deadpan, humdrum voice, B. J. Novak will whisper surrealist and imaginatively absurd stories into your ear. You may laugh, but Novak’s whisper both tingles and confounds. Each story reads like a journal entry, a simple, mundane, insignificant, quiet detail of life. But when one attempts to breach the […]

In 1923, an uncommonly talented young poet named Kathryn Irene Glascock—already published in Vanity Fair and Poetry—passed away soon after graduating from Mount Holyoke College. The same year, the college’s Department of English established the Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Competition to honor her memory, enabled by a gift from her parents. […]