By TESSA WANG COLUMNIST Meet Oscar: A morbidly obese ghetto nerd who hails from Santo Domingo, can’t get laid, worships anime, cannot get laid, speaks fluent Elvish, cannot get laid, and aspires to become the Dominican Tolkien. (Did I…

By ROSE GREEN GUEST WRITER With Fifty Shades of Grey recently coming out in theaters the erotic novel, which quickly rose to the top of the New York Times bestseller list is on the minds of many. Is the erotic novel worth the read or is…

By TESSA YANG COLUMNIST    In Gish Jen’s second novel, Mona in the Promised Land, protagonist Mona Chang grows up in Scarsdale, New York, struggling to establish her own place in the vibrant counterculture of the 1960s. Most of the…

By TESSA YANG COLUMNIST Civilwarland in Bad Decline By George Saunders Welcome to dystopian USA, where the Walmarts are gutted, the gangs are formidable, and the wealthy find solace from it all in underfunded theme parks. In a darkly…

By COLIN G. BALDWIN COLUMNIST        Human value is found at the heart of many stories, even if it is disguised with romance, coming of age, or tragedy.  Discovering one’s potential gives meaning and purpose in life, and finding those…

By TESSA YANG COLUMNIST Just what is Professor Malik Solanka so furious about? Is it the corruption of his beloved character “Little Brain” from a fearless intellectual into a brainless pop star? Is it himself, for abandoning his wife…

By COLIN G. BALDWIN COLUMNIST In the quiet Irish countryside three children go missing, but only one is found.  The child is discovered in the woods covered in blood with no memory of what happened to him.  The blood is not his and he…