Larayb Abrar Features Editor

When You Are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris

In this collection of humorous memoirs and personal essays, Sedaris explores death, dying, addiction and adjustment to change. Through his works, he takes commonplace occurrences such as unemployment after graduation, miscommunication in a foreign language and heartbreak, and expresses them hilariously while also finding greater meaning in common life instances.

Chiran Raj Pandey Deputy Opinion Editor

Howl, by Allen Ginsberg

Written during the Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is a poem about the jazz, the poetry, the homosexuality and the drugs that made the “best minds” of Ginsberg’s generation — those minds that “got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana” and that “chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx.” Considered among the defining works of the Beat Generation, Ginsberg writes Howl with a new kind of poetic fervor that was being developed in the works of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. The Beat — those beat by the dying U.S. American dream, and those driven by the irregular jazz beat — dominates Ginsberg’s poem as he addresses Carl Solomon — “I’m with you in Rockland // where you’re madder than I am.”

Rodrigo Luque Deputy News Editor

Doubt, by John Patrick Shanley

This is a play written by John Patrick Shanley that I read for my Literary Interpretations class. Gripping from the very beginning, the play depicts the role of doubt in our lives. Someone is accused of something dreadful, and the reader — or the viewer of the play — might find it more difficult than expected to make up their minds about the role of each character. Making sense of the title, doubt is present throughout the play, regarding religion, education, guilt or life in general. It is a text full of questions, or statements that make more questions arise. It is also brilliantly written and composed, and the prologue hints at the depth of what the playwright is trying to discuss.