Literature

How much are you willing to sacrifice for your desire? This is a central question of R.O. Kwon’s recent novel, Exhibit. Written in urgent and lyrical prose, Exhibit follows two Korean American women—Jin, a photographer, and Lidija, a ballerina—as they push towards artistic ambition. When they are introduced, Jin has been in a long-term relationship

Think about whether it was rape for a long time. When people tell you they are pretty sure you were raped, say, “But I took the drugs.” (See: “A Brief History of Assault”) Wonder if the lies he tells you about yourself that you know are not true are, in fact, true. Wonder if he

I wrote much of Lesbian Love Story during the Covid-19 lockdown, when I was desperate to build queer community inside the walls of my own home. From my living room, with the cat making the occasional interjection as she strutted across the keyboard, I slowly connected with a community of archivists at libraries, universities, and

My Superstitions Are Your Inheritance The following story was chosen by Carmen Maria Machado as the winner of the 2024 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. The prize is awarded annually by Selected Shorts and a guest author judge. Subscribe to Selected Shorts wherever you get your podcasts to hear this story performed by an actor in

In high school I read Adrienne Rich’s A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. My copy is dog-eared with outlines of lips I drew on the cover and inside there are countless underlines in my teenaged scrawl. In the poems, Rich quotes from archives, weaving women’s letters and diaries to “stitch” (her word) a

The first time I watched the movie Safe, it was for six minutes, and it was an emergency. I’d written a novel that opens with an invitation to a baby shower. The baby shower was my Chekov’s gun. It had to go off—but it didn’t. The clock was running out. My manuscript needed to be

I’ve never seen a ghost. I’ve slept in haunted houses, in haunted hotels. I’ve heard more than one family story about ghostly encounters. But I’ve never myself felt a ghostly chill; I’ve never been unable to explain an odd noise, a wispy miasma. Still, my whole life I’ve been fascinated with them—the idea of ghosts,

On the Origin of An Ending Claire Kohda Share article An End by Claire Kohda The sun doesn’t reach the lowest part of our valley for six months each year. It is the position of the mountains. They are very tall on all sides, and with their height they manage to keep daylight from us,

Anna Dorn is an author who I will automatically read anything she writes, no matter what it’s about. I love her sense of humor, and how her novels are always such delicious fun. If you find yourself in a reading slump (we all get them!) and need a book to remind you how entertaining reading

When Anna Gazmarian was diagnosed with bipolar disorder while still in college, she expected to be supported by her church community. Instead of finding support during a dramatic life change, she discovered that many in the church viewed her illness as an affliction of the spirit rather than an actual medical condition. Gazmarian spent the

Of all the craft books I’ve read in my life, perhaps none have stuck with me quite as clearly as the assertion, at the beginning of Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, that, rather than waiting for inspiration to strike, an aspiring writer must sit down regularly for an appointment with the muse. If you do this,

It’s that time of year again, dust off your English Literature degrees and…interpret these emojis? Take our quiz to see how your texting skills help you name these 25 books! A little rusty? All the answers are at the bottom! Click here for the first round of guessing the book title and here for more literary trivia. Answers

There’s a common misconception that university presses only publish academic work–monographs or detailed studies of a single specialized subject or other discipline-specific scholarly books. However, university presses, while housed in universities, also publish a broad range of award-winning books for general audiences, including memoirs, essay collections, novels, short story collections, poetry collections, and hybrid, mixed-genre

“Black Feminism For Beyonce, Megan, and Me” by Jennifer Stewart When Beyoncé released her self-titled album in 2013, I realized I might be a feminist. “Flawless,” was a self-affirming, feminist anthem complete with a recording of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reading from her seminal work We Should All Be Feminists. I was so enamored that I

Graphic storytelling is a medium that can capture the intricacies of identity and belonging in a way that prose can’t through the use of color, shading, and linework to denote different moods, time periods, and perspectives.  My book, Advocate, utilizes these techniques to represent the different parts of my identity: the son of Korean immigrants,

Taxonomy Can’t Classify My Fruiting Body Self-Portrait as Resurrection Fern we wonder / what saved us? what for?—H.D.When I came to myself again,I thought yes, this time, yes,and stretched on the mossin the forest I’d known for seven adolescences. Lichens, leaves,and limbs glistened beneath me, and I no longer resembled a cluster of dust, something

Shze-Hui Tjoa’s The Story Game is an unflinching investigation into herself—represented in the text as ‘Hui’—and her lost memories from a dark place called ‘Room’ during her years as a piano prodigy in Singapore. A script-like dialogue between Hui and her sister Nin in Room structures the book from the start: the reader is swiftly

I used to think there was nothing more embarrassing than to write about the internet. It wasn’t literary, I thought, and to give it a place in my fiction would be to admit not only how much time I spent online, but how much this time meant to me. Besides, who was I to write