10 Books to Get You through Midterm Season

By: Autumn Magro

Let’s face it: midterms are pretty horrible and come out of nowhere like a badly written side-character. I am what many Internet bibliophiles refer to as a mood reader, so when I have three exams on a Thursday and my car won’t start, I’ll find it difficult to enjoy Raskolnikov’s downfall in Crime & Punishment. […]

Becoming the Writer That I’ve Always Been

By: Julia Alexander

Ever since I could read and write, I have been infatuated with storytelling. I remember the desk in my childhood bedroom overflowing with half-filled notebooks and the scraps of torn out pages. My handwriting, barely legible to anyone but myself, was scrawled across papers that were stalked high like mountains. My older sister, always vigilant, […]

How to Read a Book (in Case You Didn’t Know)

By Sabrina O’Brien

People often find that I am the most unconventional of English majors. No, I don’t write a lot; no I don’t read novels in a day; no I don’t like Hemingway (which is a comment that has earned me many looks from my fellow students); if you want a story about the American dream, I’m […]

What to Read if You Had a Year Left to Live

By: Sydney Lauro

Prognosis: you’ve got twelve months left to live. The good news? If you’re literate, you could easily read a book a month. Therefore, it’s time to give up Grey’s Anatomy and escape Meredith’s constant, cliché, and contrived diatribes about life and actually consume a worthwhile use of the English language. January: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and […]

It’s Time to Talk to People About Books

By: Autumn Magro

I started a YouTube channel because I had failed. A Harper Perennial Classic edition of The Bell Jar sat half-read on my desk as the recruiter told me over the phone that the aforementioned publisher had gone with someone else. I put the copy underneath a stack of my resumes. It was clear now that […]

On (Not) Writing While Traveling

By: Stephanie Koo

Would it be blasphemous to suggest that I didn’t have the time of my life while I was abroad? I should have expected to feel this way, in all honesty. At the time, the opportunity that I had received felt like a once in a lifetime adventure. When else was I going to be able […]

The Inconvenience of Inspiration

By: Mairead Loschi

Ever since I was young, inspiration has been my fickle friend. Let me set the scene: it is a late August evening, just creeping toward dusk. My sister and I are playing on the front lawn of my Grandma’s summer home. My mom remembers me rushing in through the sliding screen door, dashing into the […]

An ode to Jim Harrison

By Sten Spinella

Jim Harrison died on Saturday, March 26th, 2016. Don’t let the innocuous name fool you; Harrison was an extraordinary man. For those who watch the show Californication, consider Harrison, who spent a portion of his career in Hollywood working on screenplays, a more talented Hank Moody with a blind left eye (a girl shoved a […]