Sumanth Prabhaker is Orion’s editor in chief.
Sumanth Prabhaker
Feature
Too Fantastical: A Look at Lane Smith’s Imaginary Creatures
It would take a very advanced calculator to tally up the hours my children have spent absorbed in the work of Lane Smith, whose smudgecore aesthetic defies the idea that an Continue reading
Feature
‘The Metamorphosis’ Transforms with This Charming Translation
After years of Richard Dawkins-like grumpiness, I finally revisited Kafka’s The Metamorphosis through Susan Bernofsky’s 2014 translation and discovered it as a whole new creature: sweet, charming, curious, and terrifyingly realistic. Continue reading
Editorial
The Mystery
of the Falls
PERHAPS the most obvious example is Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay’s Gothic pastoral about a group of girls who venture to the top of a mountain and fall into a kind of metaphysical Continue reading
Editorial
Heart of the Home
SOMEWHERE in North Carolina is a very large house once owned by a very wealthy man whose name I forget. Perhaps you’ve been there. It’s a large house with many corridors, Continue reading
blog post
Editor’s Choice: “What I Wanted to Tell You About the Wind”
THE HANDFUL OF TIMES I’ve ever been asked to advise new writers, I’ve gone back to something I once read from, or perhaps projected onto, Haruki Murakami: ideas are lonely creatures. Continue reading
Editorial
Just Looking
THE PURPOSE OF THE TRIP was to see my mother’s father one last time, but on the way in we stopped for a day in Mumbai to stretch our legs. I’d Continue reading
blog post
Editor’s Choice: “This Land Was Made”
WE KNEW, going into this issue of Orion, that any conversation around racial identity and the land wouldn’t be complete without a close look at soil. It’s the material of Continue reading
Editorial
The Food of Resistance
IT COULD have been anything, but it was salt. It could have been police violence, which was all too present, or the land tax, which siphoned crops and maintained a centuries-long Continue reading
blog post
Editor’s Choice: “Of Birds and Barley”
“Is humankind so intrinsically ugly that we seek deliverance by not only yearning after, but also actually imitating other creatures, such that the aping of swans by skilled dancers has become Continue reading
blog post
Editor’s Choice: “Animal Planet”
“If Orion lives at the intersection of nature, science, and culture, we can see Lulu’s kitchen from our porch.” Starting with Spring 2020, Orion’s editor Sumanth Prabhaker will select one feature Continue reading