Literature

Broken Men On the Outskirts of Town Trebuchet Mama says the reason why all the broken men live on the outskirts of town is for our protection. But Grandpa and Mr. Bandage don’t seem broken to me though Mr. Bandage claims that a thief stole parts of his face, his left ear, and even his

I first heard the term “smart women adrift” from my graduate school professor, Sigrid Nunez—herself a master of writing incisive female characters. At the time, the term made me laugh, because it opened an umbrella over a type of literary woman who had long existed, unclassified, in my literary consciousness, and there is something funny

Three weeks after my third book came out, I experienced the first unmasked autistic shutdown of my life. What happened was this: driven into the ground by overwhelm—over-stimulated from doing larger events than I was accustomed to doing and feeling visible to readers in ways I’d never been before—I found myself unable to speak for

“Every refugee’s story opens in horror, passes through betrayal, and ends in a question.” This sentence, spoken by a protagonist in my new novel, The Good Deed, came to me on one of my visits to the overcrowded, fetid refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos. I began going there in 2018 when I

Newly Single in a World of “We” Kate Axelrod Share article Women Who Rule the Screen by Kate Axelrod The woman sitting next to me on the train had pink hair and wore a bracelet made with small alphabet beads that spelled out *DEAD*DAD*CLUB*. She snored for most of the trip, but it was more

Emily Raboteau’s essay collection Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse” opens in 2011, with the author on her way to a baby shower for her first child. While passing through Times Square, she spots a sign announcing that the world will end on her baby’s due date. She laughs it off, but as her

In Fruit of the Dead, Rachel Lyon sets “a snare for the bloom-like girl.” This novel is a searing, imaginative retelling of Persephone, both memory and warning for any reader raised as a daughter, or parent to one. Cory Ansel—18, aimless, judged beautiful by all but herself—is ferried to the private island owned by Rolo,

I have always found myself building extremely romantic friendships. Long hours lost to phone calls, text marathons, letters, no-reason gifts, the sharing of meals and secrets and small, tender intimacies.  For whatever reason, it has always seemed apparent that my friendships—if handled with devotion and care—will outlast my romantic relationships. Through adolescence and early adulthood

Like many authors, I don’t write alongside a “day job” but rather a portfolio career. For over a decade a key strand of my work has focused on human rights non-fiction editing. During the U.K.’s covid lockdown, the femicide rate spiked even as my clients (frontline workers, activists and academics) struggled to get support for

“Public Parts” by Dayna Mahannah For the first hour, I sat alone on a stool with my cheese slices, enclosed in a private corner nook of classroom A046, wearing pool sandals and a trench coat. I could overhear the students introducing themselves. For some, it was their first life drawing class; others were charcoal-cuticled vets.

Jessie Ren Marshall lives on an off-the-grid farm on Hawai’i Island. Women! In! Peril!, her irreverent stories are, as the title suggests, about women of various guises facing messy, precarious situations. This partial list of protagonists is a good indicator of Marshall’s amplitude: an Asian sex robot trying to outlast her return policy, a lesbian

Installing Ourselves in the Memory Museum The Museum Was Built So No One Would Forget . . . us, pottery fragments once dusted in warm sand—jagged, mismatched—today, preserved in glass. it began to rain while we walked from the bar, so we came here, listening to artifacts speak about their hieroglyphs, even after we learned

Animals are all around us; as I write this, stinkbugs are crawling on my office window, squirrels are busy in the white pines and poplar trees, and (though I can’t see them) deer and bobcats are roaming not far away. Culture usually trains us to draw sharp lines between ourselves and all other species. We

We have a winner! There were many strong contenders, but there was one book that cleared every round with a trail of broken hearts and rose to the top on a tidal wave of tears. But before we reveal the winner, here is some behind-the-scenes commentary on the competition: While we’re really impressed with how

A few years ago, I found myself getting into short books.  Works of fiction mostly, very short story collections.  I was quite literally attracted to their shortness—the slim spines a definite selling point.  At first I worried that my attention span was shrinking.   That soon—perhaps very soon—I wouldn’t read anything at all.  But no: I

Is This Dissertation Research or a First Date? Lily Meyer Share article An excerpt from Short War by Lily Meyer Buenos Aires, Argentina, February 2015 Nina Lazris met her husband in the week between arriving in Buenos Aires and discovering the book that punched holes in her personal history. Besides that, she did little of

Growing up with a pair of hearing aids, it never occurred to me that deafness was an experience. Mostly it was a problem that I was taught to hide. When I started meeting other deaf people my own age, and learning British Sign Language, I began to see deafness from a new perspective. Books, when

“When you say ‘departure,’ what does that mean?” Marie-Helene Bertino asks me.  This question launches our conversation about her new novel, Beautyland. Given that the story opens with spaceship Voyager 1 leaving planet earth, it makes sense that the author is attentive to the semantics of “departure.” I’d used the word as I referenced Bertino’s