The Brooklyn Rail

In Conversation

What's the Point of Love?: Sarah Gerard with Christine Sang

What does it mean to believe that something is true? What does it mean to believe anything at all?

Julia Fierro's The Gypsy Moth Summer

By Christine Sang

Do we live in our dreams or are we more fully realized in the events that surround us? Is our consumption of literature and fairytales useful in unraveling the intensity of what life throws our way? The Gypsy Moth Summer reads like a fairytale, complete with an enchanted maze that twists the lives of those who enter, just as these same lives run smack up against the Long Island-esque garden’s wall of cancer, race, and class war. 

In Conversation

State Your Name for the Record: NATALIE SINGER with Christine Sang

By Christine Sang

In Natalie Singer’s memoir, California Calling: A Self-Interrogation, (Hawthorne Books, March 1, 2018), the author lays out all manner of forces to evacuate a silenced voice, a self she lost at sixteen years old. California Calling is the remembering of a mosaic of experiences, growing up female in a divided family, within the myths of California—a state that promised becoming and belonging.

In Conversation

Refuge in Peril: LAURIE SHECK with Christine Sang

Laurie Sheck’s hybrid novel Island of the Mad   arrives in paperback on September 12, 2017, after an original publishing date of December 2016 by Counterpoint Press. She is also the author of A Monster’s Notes (Knopf, 2009, included in “10 Best Fictions of the Year” by Entertainment Weekly) and five books of poetry, one of which was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize (Willow Grove, Knopf, 1998).

In Conversation

DALE PECK with Christine Sang

n Dale Peck’s novel, Night Soil, Judas plows through men, his mother, and his family’s past to unearth his own identity from the disintegration of truth found in his mother’s pots, his grandfather’s legacy, nature preserves, and the mine that financed it all on the backs of slaves.