About this Newsletter

Excavate words, syntax, and social context and you'll find subsurface meanings running beneath. This newsletter performs close readings of fiction and comments on fiction, nonfiction, society, time, memory, rhetoric, and the structures that shape our present moment. Language is inadequate — and yet.

This multidisciplinary newsletter is about language and story. It's about trying to make sense of our society, power, our emotions and the history of ideas in and outside of America. It is about trying to make aesthetics visible — it is interested in naming and identifying the choices writers make and the effects of those choices.

There may be occasional recipes; I like to work out ideas for fiction or criticism while making cocktails or cakes. If I'm deeply called to a book, there may be interviews, not only of authors, but also lawyers, artists, entrepreneurs, politicians, and anyone whose projects depend on rhetorical, linguistic, and stylistic choices. I am Bay Area through and through, and this newsletter will likely reflect that.

I receive direct messages about writing, criticism, fiction, the effects of law on society, sustaining a practice, publishing, and creative experiments often enough that I think it would be great to answer them more broadly. Please send your literary questions to me here: anitafelicelli AT gmail.com.