About 6 months ago, I finally read Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I could write a series of separate essays analyzing its themes, but here I will focus on the motif I found most singularly resonant: the image of a cramped and squalid room. Raskolnikov spends much of the novel in his tiny apartment, Continue reading

I hate it when it gets cold. I do not say this because I’m from Southern California, where cold weather is spoken about like a foreign war. I went to college in Utah and now live in Washington, and while I feel great nostalgia for the smokey scent of the chapparal and sagebrush in the… Continue reading