Lily Nilipour

Throughout last Thursday's event, hosted by the Creative Writing Program, Chang emphasized the malleability and possibility of language, and the way that plays into her poetic process.

But without classes, close reading itself became absent, and I soon realized that it wasn’t necessarily literature itself that sustains me — it must also include the subsequent act of analysis. For when we make sense of what we read, we are making sense of our own lives — and in a time like this, when the world around us often doesn’t make sense, the act of sense-making becomes even more crucial.

Rather than as an interrogation of free will, we may interpret this question literally these days as a question of freedom versus confinement. “Can it be we are not free?” feels like an eloquent rephrasing of the “What do you mean I can’t go outside?” that accompanied the first waves of COVID-19.

For Black History Month, Reads beat writers offer their recommendations for their favorite books by Black authors that thoughtfully and masterfully engage with race and racial justice in America.

Lily Nilipour is the Vol. 259 Reads desk editor for Arts & Life and an English major on a gap year. She loves to talk modernism — especially Virginia Woolf — digital humanities and literary magazines. Contact her at lnilipour ‘at’ stanforddaily.com

Lily Nilipour is the Vol. 259 Reads desk editor for Arts & Life and an English major on a gap year. She loves to talk modernism — especially Virginia Woolf — digital humanities and literary magazines. Contact her at lnilipour ‘at’ stanforddaily.com

Lily Nilipour is the Vol. 259 Reads desk editor for Arts & Life and an English major on a gap year. She loves to talk modernism — especially Virginia Woolf — digital humanities and literary magazines. Contact her at lnilipour ‘at’ stanforddaily.com

Lily Nilipour is the Vol. 259 Reads desk editor for Arts & Life and an English major on a gap year. She loves to talk modernism — especially Virginia Woolf — digital humanities and literary magazines. Contact her at lnilipour ‘at’ stanforddaily.com

Barrera announces the raison d’être of her little text: to investigate the overwhelming loneliness of the lighthouse, and, by extension, ourselves. And when else would we most relate to this proclamation, if not now?

Lily Nilipour is the Vol. 259 Reads desk editor for Arts & Life and an English major on a gap year. She loves to talk modernism — especially Virginia Woolf — digital humanities and literary magazines. Contact her at lnilipour ‘at’ stanforddaily.com

Lily Nilipour is the Vol. 259 Reads desk editor for Arts & Life and an English major on a gap year. She loves to talk modernism — especially Virginia Woolf — digital humanities and literary magazines. Contact her at lnilipour ‘at’ stanforddaily.com