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[...] The Granola Cruncher, too, chooses to understand her story in her own terms. Refusing to yield to fear during and after a horrific, life-changing experience, she chooses to open herself to others despite the inevitability of pain. Although they face the very real threat of continued emotional…

In The Language of Pain, theorist David Biro muses about our impetus to turn inward and succumb to pain: "Pain," he explains, "silences us. So why bother trying to speak? Why not just close one's eyes ... and wait for it to pass? And for those who witness pain, why bother trying to break down the…

[...] In his review of Adaptation, David Ulin argues for seeing Kaufman not as merely a screenplay writer but as a "great American writer ... [with] his mastery of structure, his voice and vision, his recognition of the power of the word to remake the world -- he stands with the finest writers of…

[...] Wallace argues that "part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering" so that we might "more easily conceive of others identifying with our own [suffering]." Second, he claims "a big part of real art fiction's job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness an…

[...] Through encounters with character after character whose perspective has narrowed to an impossibly painful point, and through the search for a context that might redeem all that suffering, the act of reading the book becomes similar to one of the AA meetings it depicts -- through Identificatio…