Dean Bakopoulos: The Reason Life is So Strange: Some Thoughts on Options (January 2020)

Dean Bakopoulos examines the role that options, both their abundance and their scarcity, play in confessional narratives, looking at fiction by Mohsin Hamid, Yiyun Li, and Donna Tartt, and poems by Louise Glück, Paige Lewis, and Danez Smith. How does the infusion of new options add energy to a work when the action of the work has reached a stalemate? What role does the surreal concept of “choice” play in the way we understand our roles as creators of literary texts?