Riot Headline The Best Books of 2024

Loyal Miles

Loyal Miles grew up in Midwestern suburbia near the intersection of streets named Valleyview and Amarado, not far from the geographic center of continental America. He now lives within shouting distance of the BQE in Brooklyn, where he writes long poems and short stories.

Mohican Forest, Floating City, and Physician Poet

A reflection on William Carlos Williams's IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN

Why Can’t I Finish This Book?

While we at the Riot are taking this lovely summer week off to rest (translation: read by the pool/ocean/on our ...

Why Can’t I Finish This Book?

My struggle to finish reading any single book has apparently carried into writing this post, which began about a month ...

The “Gifts” of Re-Reading: Notes from the Margins of Myself

While we at the Riot take some time off to rest and catch up on our reading, we’re re-running some of ...

The “Gifts” of Re-Reading: Notes from the Margins of Myself

A question in a summer of re-reading: How do you literally handle what you once loved and what you might ...

Boys and Fire: A High School Book Project and a Few Solid YouTube Book Reenactments

It was fall, and with two classmates from AP English at Wichita Northwest, I had raked together an epic backyard ...

“Our mouths are incapable, white violets cover the earth”—On the Road with David Foster Wallace, with Visits to John Locke and Anne Carson

For the past month, on the daily subway ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I’ve been reading Although Of Course You ...

The Art of Reading: To Bend Space, For Beautiful

In an interview on PBS’ Art 21, artist Richard Serra describes the stringent restraints he assigned himself in his early ...

In the Rearview: Joan Didion’s Slouching towards Bethlehem and the Ages of Anxiety

It’s sunny late-1940s Los Angeles. A veteran police detective and a veteran prostitute share a walk in the park. There ...

Anne Carson and Edward Hopper’s “Room in Brooklyn”: The Poetry of Art

In hissing flames huge silver bars are roll’d, And stubborn brass, and tin, and solid gold [. . .] There ...