TCR Talks with Sirje Kiin

March 19, 2019 Interview Poetry TCR Daily
BY: KAIA Gallagher

Sirje Kiin is an Estonian writer, poet, and journalist currently living in South Dakota, and the biographer of Marie Under, one of Estonia’s best-known poets.

Born in 1883, Marie Under established herself as one of Estonia’s premier poets in the beginning of the twentieth century through her expressionist and neo-romantic poems. Her early poetry explored themes of happiness, joy, and erotic love. Later, during the 1920s, she addressed topics related to justice and death, with lyrics that merged dark, apocalyptic visions with a yearning for happiness and all-embracing love.

Read more

With A Demon On Your Chest

March 16, 2019 Fiction TCR Daily
BY: Severin AllGood

It’s Christmas Day and you lie in bed between two girls, but not in a hot, Cinemax After Dark type of way. More in the sense that you all took too many Xanax after you left the bar and passed out together fully clothed. The one girl’s room is a mess. Dirty dishes and overturned ashtrays are scattered around. Half-empty beer bottles with cigarette butts floating in them. Moldy to-go containers from every delivery place in a three-mile radius. Even huddled together with these two, you’re still freezing. You wonder if the house has heat. Winter in Portland is no place to be without heat.

Read more

TCR Talks with Helene Stapinski

February 27, 2019 Interview Nonfiction TCR Daily
BY: Lindsay jamieson

 

Helene Stapinski is a best-selling author of three memoirs: Five Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History, which has been made into a documentary; Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair with Music; and her latest, Murder in Matera: A True Story of Passion, Family, and Forgiveness in Southern Italy. Her essays have appeared in several anthologies, including Drinking Diaries: Women Serve Their Stories Straight Up.

Read more

The Farmers in the Fields

February 22, 2019 Fiction TCR Daily
BY: Ziaul Moid Khan

“Is it my right to snatch food from their hands?” I asked myself. The answer was a lone, long silence. This family had done a lot to get me here, at this position. Not that I was super rich and all that, but at least I was just above a hand-to-mouth condition. They were still there, squaring their shoulders with the same grinding poverty.

Read more

The Favourite and Mary Queen of Scots: Putting the Period in a Period Piece

February 20, 2019 Film Review TCR Daily

By: Pallavi Yetur As the Oscars approach, the clear message is that among 2018’s films about lady English monarchs, The Favourite was the favorite. With ten nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, the film was director Yorgos Lanthimos applying his signature darkly comedic treatment to the story of a crumbling Queen Anne and the two women…

Read more