Literature

Before I had children, I was fascinated by fictional depictions of daughters whose mothers had bailed. How were they shaped by this primal loss? How could any mother justify inflicting such damage? I became a mother myself, and suddenly my point of view shifted. I was still mindful of the ways our mothers’ choices form

My Son’s Love Life Is None of My Business, Except It Is Yukiko Tominaga Share article I Heard My Son Kissing a Girl by Yukiko Tominaga On Oscar night, I heard my son kissing a girl. He was fifteen years old and this was the first time he had brought a girl to our place.

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Journalist Sasha Vasilyuk’s debut novel Your Presence Is Mandatory is a poignant look at the reverberating effects of war through the story of a Ukrainian World War II veteran’s struggle to hide a damaging secret for the sake of his family.  Vasilyuk’s book begins with death—the first chapter featuring a family at the grave in

Whenever I travel to a new city, my favorite way to get to know the community is to venture into local bookstores. Anything from feminist shops that highlight writers of color to bookstore/cafe hybrids, I never quite know what I’m walking into, and that buzz of excitement never gets old. Last year, we shared some

On March 28, Small Press Distribution (SPD), the 55-year old company that helped 385 indie publishers deliver their books to customers, collapsed without warning. This is an existential blow in a business where finances are delicate at the best of times. Books remain stranded in warehouses and could take months to be recovered, past income

When I watched The Shining for the first time, the movie got stuck right when Jack Nicholson’s character takes an axe to the door of the room where his wife is hiding. “Here’s Johnny,” he’s about to declare, thrusting his face through the half-demolished door. But we got stuck just before that, when the door

I had a plan for the year I turned 30: I was going to leave behind the life I’d spent a decade building in New York City and trade it in for a warmer, flashier iteration in Los Angeles. That’s a well-tread trope, isn’t it? The old “NYC to LA to NYC to LA ad

“Labyrinth” by Jan Edwards Hemming When I think of Girl #3, I think of the tiny scars I carry: the word whore; my disdain for pugs; accusations of poisoning oatmeal. I don’t do shots anymore. When people ask why, I usually say I’m too old for that, but what I mean is Because the last

For as long as we can remember (and excuse this lofty introduction), genre has served the dual purpose of business and pleasure. When you hear sci-fi, you often think of laser guns, riotous botanical monsters, or even the slowly scrolling words that begin “A long time ago in a galaxy far far away.” But consider

And You Thought the SAT Was Bad Oceania “I know what you must be thinking,” the mother says. “A 3400 to 5800? Impossible. But oh no, we know about you. Ariel wants the perfect score. His brother got the perfect score.” She pulls her chair off the back wall of my office to the middle

It was a clear, cold night in February when my wife and I took our seats in the sold-out Beacon Theatre to await what would be the most creative one woman show we had seen since Edinburgh Fringe last summer.  Earsplitting screams peeled out into the air as the performer coolly took the stage, meeting

I left New York in 2009 for grad school, and by the time I returned—just a few years later—the city had been transformed. Walking to the subway, on the sidewalks and escalators, almost everyone carried a pet screen. Sometimes people banged into things or ran into each other, too absorbed in the digital world to

It has been almost thirty years since the Academy of American Poets launched National Poetry Month, and the vitality of American poetry has only grown since then. These new and forthcoming 2024 poetry collections showcase the diversity and talent of the poets writing today. Their words inspire a new way of thinking and being, encouraging

A Madman on the Ground, A Visionary in Flight Joe Fassler Joe Fassler is editor of Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process (Penguin). Share article An excerpt from The Sky Was Ours by Joe Fassler A man stepped into the barn. It wasn’t the boy I’d seen at the tower.

Situationships are underrated—said no one ever. But dare I say, as much as I despised situationships IRL (despite spending much of my teens and early twenties in them), I do love them in fiction, where they indeed might be underrated. Many a novel has been written about marriage, affairs, star-crossed lovers and the one that

One of the most defining aspects of living with an invisible illness or disability is its accompanying isolation. That your suffering is not seeable—and thus, seemingly less real or impactful—means people in your life often struggle to understand, believe, or empathize with your needs. Even worse, others will often directly accuse you of lying or

In January 2016, I was an unpublished writer working on my first novel when I learned of an artist residency on a tiny island off the west coast of South Korea. Excited, I daydreamed of finishing my manuscript in my motherland, visiting family, and of course, eating an abundance of delicious food. As I dug