Literature

The world is burning, and the smoke is all the proof we need. Over 18,000 Palestinians have been killed, “collateral damage” in the ongoing war, and over 1.5 million Gazans have been displaced from their homes. In Sudan, the civil war has resulted in a mass ethnic cleansing. Since April of 2023, more than 18,800

Redfin, Show Me a Renovated Version of Myself In Grover Cleveland’s Childhood Home There, on Redfin, is Grover Cleveland’s childhood home. Price: $295,000. Despite my undergraduate degree in history, my knowledge of Grover Cleveland is scant. I can only pick him out of a presidential lineup is if he’s included twice for those nonconsecutive terms.

There are the stories and books that we simply read and cherish, and then there are those that we cannot stop thinking about, can quote verbatim, and find ourselves returning to. Why certain works transcend into the indelible is a mystery but we recognize it when it happens. For writers, these works become touchstones to

For a long time, much of what was published about El Salvador was a grim monolith, authored by outsiders: gringo historians, mid-century anthropologists, Céline models. If you read Joan Didion’s terse little book on the place, Salvador, you might have the idea that “terror is the given of the place.” I could write for a

Ghosts and spirits have a heavy presence in Jewish folklore, from Talmudic ghost-summoning rituals to Yiddish folk stories passed down through generations. There’s a touch of magic in those tales, always with the very Jewish common denominator that the unexplainable doesn’t need to be explained, that the mysterious doesn’t need to be solved. When I

She’s More Alive Online Than in Her Body Eugenie Montague Share article An excerpt from Swallow the Ghost by Eugenie Montague When Jane wakes up, her throat hurts. She reaches for the glass of water she keeps by the bed. The glass is solid and cold from the room, and it has made the water

After his mother dies, the protagonist of Kat Tang’s debut novel, Five-Star Stranger, chances into a gig as a “rental stranger”: someone hired via app to be whomever the client needs. For ten years, he immerses himself in roles ranging from airline hypeman to mourner, lives alone in a utilitarian apartment, and zealously enforces boundaries

“What if the word Monster formed a kind of net with which to trawl the wide sea, gathering anything that didn’t resemble the creatures deemed familiar and permitted in your world?”—The Palace of Eros In this epic rewriting of the myth of Eros and Psyche, Caro de Robertis connects trans and queer histories to ancient

Though they’ve been icons of cinema for a while—see: Sadako, Shutter—it’s taken English literature a little longer to catch up to Asian women front and centre in stories of ghosts and horror.  The prevalence of female ghosts across Asia has always interested me: how often their origin is rooted in concepts of failed femininity and

Contemporary literature is one of those four-dimensional things that seem to expand whenever you take a closer look. No one really knows more than a corner of it, perhaps a very large one, but a corner nevertheless. This quality, this mercuriality, of literature makes it more endless than any ocean, more filled with uncharted islands

When people think about loss, what usually comes to mind is the death of a loved one, but there are so many other things we have to let go of, and say goodbye to, as we move through life—relationships (romantic and otherwise), youth, health, homes, innocence, life as we know it. We are always saying

Orbits, Collisions, and Ricochets by Amethyst Loscocco My father and I gazed at the comet searing the night horizon. As he sometimes did after dinner, he had pulled out a small army-green telescope bought at a yard sale and placed it on top of our blue station wagon, where it stood at an easy height

Because a love story must occur between two particular people, in a particular society that the characters need to appease or disregard or acknowledge in some way, it also becomes a rich social portrait of that particular place in time; which makes the novels on this list—from a young boyhood romance in 1970s Brazil to

The Unspeakable Cruelty of the Left Hand Visual Noise Click to enlarge Recollection Finding your scarf, I recalled [telling you twenty percentof people die of cancer. Amazed, you askedwhat percent of people die—like youcould only measure sorrow (within the widthof its loom. When I first met you I knew I must beginto practice for grief,

Have you ever come across a close friend’s love letters? In today’s world, this is more akin to accidentally reading private texts or emails open on a roommate’s laptop, but there are still the fortunate few out there who have the time and discipline and romanticism to write by hand and spell out the name

In 1947, the British ended their long and extractive colonial rule in India with a final cruel act: dividing it into two nations, Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.  Despite my family’s roots in India, I had little idea of Partition’s impact on my own family. I knew my father’s family had moved from Hyderabad Deccan

In the first drafts of my debut novel Medusa, I was consumed by the idea of what it meant to be a monster in a story you didn’t control. Medusa is one of the most recognizable monsters of Greek mythology, with the writhing mass of snakes for hair and the turning people to stone with

Her Father’s Sex Life Is the Star of the Show Jo Hamya Share article An excerpt from The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya There was summer, a beach; a country they were still getting used to in the early stages of their holiday. There was a map of tourists on the sand with bared stomachs on