Literature

“All academia is dark academia.” I said it without thinking, a knee-jerk reaction to a literary label that had been assigned to me but always felt ill-fitting. Until that moment—discussing my first novel, If We Were Villains, with the Folger Shakespeare Library book club—I hadn’t really understood why. It was the “dark” modifier I disliked.

Heather McCalden’s genre-defying fragmentary memoir, The Observable Universe, begins with “this book is an album of grief. Every fragment is like a track on a record, a picture in a yearbook; they build on top of one another until, at the end, they form an experience.” And what an experience it is.   When McCalden was a child,

Waiting for War in Lebanon by Vera Kachouh I put my body into the sea in Lebanon only once. Its warm, salty water extended a liquid embrace, beckoning me like a lover I could never have. From the shore came my aunt’s laughter, rolling in at odd intervals on the back of the wind. I

Cozy fantasy is a fairly new term, and its definition is still being hammered out by the reading public. In my opinion, we should embrace the subjectivity of the term. “Cozy” is about how a book makes you feel. Since we all have different perspectives and life experiences, we may feel different things in response

One Day the Rice Cooker Won’t Live on the Floor Things I Say to My Partner We will live, one day,in a place with hinged doors.The chairs will not whineand the art will not be greetingcards. Our basil will all be alive.On cold days, because we will stillhave cold days, we will gatherthree dogs around

Fang Si Chi’s First Love Paradise is a seminal novel that helped kick off the #MeToo movement in Taiwan and has sold millions of copies worldwide. But only two months after the novel’s publication, the author Li Yi-Han passed away due to suicide. Shortly after, her suspected abuser was also acquitted of charges. Despite the

For Puerto Rican protest poets, one of the most important ways to appreciate and show love for Puerto Rico has been to write poems that underscore pride in their Puerto Rican cultural identity and heritage and denounce Puerto Rico’s status as a U.S. colony. As they explore Puerto Rican empowerment and expose how Puerto Rico

It’s no coincidence that there are horses on the walls of caves in Lascaux, atop St. Mark’s in Venice, under the derriere of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, and alongside the Terracotta Army in China. Since they were first domesticated more than three thousand years ago, horses have been our transport, farming equipment, war machines, source

Her Corpse Is a Wild Animal Djuna Barnes Share article No Man’s Mare by Djuna Barnes Pauvla Agrippa had died that afternoon at three; now she lay with quiet hands crossed a little below her fine breast with its transparent skin showing the veins as filmy as old lace, purple veins that were now only

Mosab Abu Toha’s second poetry collection, Forest of Noise, is a heart-wrenching account of life in Gaza, under the tightening grip of the Israeli Occupation. Abu Toha morphs his stories in verse, into a range of forms. Some written as letters from Gaza, detailing the minutiae of everyday life under siege, “Children feel petrified at

Rutherford B. Hayes is one of those presidents that can be hard to identify. Sure, most people know the name and perhaps know he falls somewhere on that foggy list between the more well-known Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Yet the election of Hayes marked a pivotal moment in the history of voting. Hayes was

Fall is the biggest season for literature, the most anticipated titles are released in September and awards season commences in November. To sort through this glorious deluge, we asked our trusted friends with the most impeccable literary taste for their recommendations for the buzziest new books, the ones they’re most excited for and can’t stop

We hear an old song—the soundtrack to a first kiss, a piece from a funeral—and the past is suddenly alive again, as vivid as a spectre at the foot of our bed. It’s not surprising that we describe melodies as haunting. This is the magic of music.  In my novel And He Shall Appear, I

Stereo Instructions by M.D. McIntyre Everything I know about the dead I learned from Beetlejuice. I didn’t see Beetlejuice in theaters when it was released in 1988, but it became a favorite a few years later when I rented it for sleepovers and watched it on cable tv. Back then I drank Vernor’s Ginger Ale

Even though Wright Thompson grew up in the Mississippi Delta, he was in college before he learned about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old child from Chicago who was tortured and murdered in the Mississippi Delta, and whose death helped ignite the civil rights movement. Due to subsequent, intentional erasure by the white community, Thompson himself didn’t

I’m Frighteningly Horny for My Girlfriend’s Ghost Fucking Ghosts! My girlfriend visits every October. She died a couple years ago. I want to break up with her but the sex is too good. She possesses my Magic Wand to make it vibrate faster, louder, harder. I come, screaming into a pillow as the overworked motor

Cebo Campbell’s debut novel, Sky Full of Elephants, revolves around a shocking and audacious premise. “They killed themselves. All at once,” the novel begins, “they” meaning all the white people in the world, who end their lives by walking into the nearest bodies of water. In America, where the novel takes place, centuries of an

We’re living in a never-before-seen age of prominent queer representation in our media…but that’s not to say that it’s perfect. We’re more likely than ever to come across queer characters in the pages of our books, but often those queer characters are depicted in a specific way: gentle, pretty, romantic but not particularly sexual, inherently