Literature

Between 1976 and 1983, tens of thousands of people “disappeared” in Argentina. Their absences were designed to create a state of terror that few were strong enough to defy. But who were “the disappeared” and what did they endure?  The majority of the “disappeared” were in their twenties and early thirties, captured and often subject

The Dumbest Animal at the Circus Is Me Alastair Wong Share article Dumb Animals by Alastair Wong The day the circus came to town, I was on duty mopping up blood so warm that steam wafted through the vast and windowless space. It puddled by the drains like spilt cranberry juice, but there was no

I grew up loving books because of my grandmother, who curated a library just for me. The narrow hallways of her house were crowded with bookshelves filled with Caldecotts, Newberys, and Coretta Scott King’s, collections of works by Alcott, Twain, and Poe, Penguin classics, and Nelson Doubleday’s Junior Deluxe Editions, which sparked my forever love

If Don’t Call Us Dead and Homie weren’t enough proof, Danez Smith’s Bluff confirms their importance in the poetic firmament through a magnificent array of form and content. Smith’s singular voice dazzles, with subject matter that is both immediate and timeless. The poems are often a linguistic simitar about the world’s many injustices—whether it’s the

In all of Martha Baillie’s books you can feel her sister. Her words offer a portal to the multiplistic experiences of existence—to understand better how cut off we can be from each other and where true connection flickers too. This year, Baillie’s memoir There is No Blue was published by Granta Books. As well, a

As a writer of both prose and poetry, I love to read work that falls between genres. Whether it’s fiction that leans into lyricism so unabashedly it should be called a poem, or a poem so loaded with narrative that it is, in effect, a lyrical essay, I celebrate the merging of poetry and plot

Riveting and unpredictable, the 2024 presidential campaign trail reads like a novel. You literally can’t make this shit up—but if someone could, it might be Charles Dickens. Here’s a six-week slice of election summer as written by 10 writers of classic fiction. The Candidate by Cormac McCarthy McCarthy’s novel moves slowly, like Biden. The gray

Wolfgang Mozart was remarkable. But then, so was his sister Nannerl. We’ve heard a lot about George Orwell, less about his fascinating wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy. How familiar are you with Dame Alice Kyteler, the first woman in Ireland to be condemned as a witch? Or Marie de France, a 12th century poet? Or Artemisia Gentileschi,

“A Matter of Voice” by Christine K. Flynn Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard. —Anne Sexton The first time I heard a voice speak words unspoken in my soul, I was 45 years old and at an American Adoption Congress conference with a new friend who had also been given

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