Ben Reed is a senior lecturer at Texas State University, where he teaches literature and creative writing. His fiction has appeared in West Branch, Cream City Review, and online at Tin House and The Adroit Journal. His essays have been published by Southern Humanities Review, The Missouri Review, The Texas Review, and The Millions. He is at work on a novel about love and analog technologies.
Content by Ben Reed
Reviews,
Negotiating the Curse of Influence – A Review of Steve Almond’s Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories
We are presented with a pragmatic statement that honest writing requires artistic integrity, or at least a soundness of intention—knowledge that, for many of us, came only from trial and error, and an omnivorous literary appetite.
Reviews,
An Inventory of Erasure: Limbo and Lucidity in “Lost Children Archive”
Luiselli nor her narrator are archival amateurs. They are detached, sophisticated. They speak to us less out of love than out of duty. Luiselli the humanist is also a moralist; she refuses to get high on her own supply. She writes that her son’s frustration at choosing what to photograph as they drive “across this strange, beautiful, dark country, is simply a sign of how our ways of documenting the world have fallen short.”