Literature

“The world here beats faster than a hummingbird’s wings,” writes Alexandra Chang in her new collection Tomb Sweeping. Chang, the author of Days of Distraction and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 recipient, writes poignantly about tenuous connection. In these stories, a wealthy housewife runs a gambling ring in Zheijiang, a young woman attends

The Mug Shot: Look straight ahead and contemplate the lousy Kirkus review you’re sure to get. The Talk Show Host: Place one hand under your chin and imagine listening to someone else, something you rarely do as a writer. The Orgasm: Throw your head back and grin ecstatically after ordering a box of your favorite

“It’s brave of us to die!” writes Melissa Broder in Death Valley, a desert survival story. The woman in Broder’s third very funny novel, like Broder’s other characters, is recognizable by her need to “control the uncontrollable,” as well as her wit, occasional panic, deep and unrelenting introspection, and love affair with Best Westerns (“Where

I Dressed Up as a Husband for My Wedding Marriage I was married once, at least we thought about it, it was in b&w, we were tiny, walking in a forest, the trees dwarfed us—the trees had been married forever, moss hung from their fallen branches, we had to step over them. We put on

For me, it all started with Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Then came the tales of Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson, Ursula LeGuin. Storytelling that takes vivid imagination combined with some devastating reality to add up to something that is unsettling and disturbing. You can get your socks spooked off by the supernatural, the ghostly, the otherworldly.

“The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover”—Mary Shelley I skipped the day we discussed Frankenstein in my Romantics Literature seminar in my sophomore year of college. It was the late 90s, a time when email existed but was only used for the most urgent and timely emergencies, text messaging was

Darrin Bell didn’t set out to write his much anticipated graphic memoir, The Talk. He’d initially sold another project delving into the lives of three generations of men in his family, all descendants of an enslaved man named Addison Bell, in a two book deal to Henry Holt and Co. But as he was working

You Can’t Raise a Daughter on Hope and Junk Food Alone Kristen Gentry Share article A New World by Kristen Gentry Parker stares at his niece Zaria’s stomach, covered by a stretched-out white tank top. Her belly is a dingy full moon creeping on the horizon of the kitchen table. She carries a whole new

From trees and mortality to colonialism and FaceTime sex, Charif Shanahan’s Trace Evidence investigates a restless range of subjects with a truth-finding precision that would be breathtaking for a single poem but is present here across an entire collection. What unites this book is the question of how to speak when one’s personhood or subjectivity

Since Walt Whitman, the American sentence has shape-shifted in and out of forms, from race-car lyrical lines that drive off the page, to fields of hailstorm words floating in white space in a way that resembles visual art, and back to semi-formal stanzas that lilt and groove around a pentameter-like beat. I’ve designed my poetry

We’re celebrating peak fall with this interactive choose-your-own-journey which will let you decide where the story goes, with book recommendations for each chapter! Apple picking or pumpkin picking? Haunted house or Halloween party? Make up or break up? The choice is yours and every answer leads to a different story. The full list of books

In Myriam Gurba’s latest essay collection Creep, the Mexican American author interrogates both those who deceive, exploit, and oppress others as well as the culture that enables them. “People who hurt other people can be charming,” Gurba notes in the title essay. “It works in their favor.” In Creep, Gurba moves beyond the memoir she

I have a set of cigarette burns zagging up my right arm. I don’t talk about them to friends—there are mainly two reasons you get burned in that particular way, and neither are good. They’re red and angry-looking, like wasps’ stings, and they’re right above my wrist which means I can’t hide them. The burns

I met Bella Swan in the middle of 2008, when the anticipatory Twilight movie poster circulated at my school. I took her home and hung her on my wall, blacks and grays covering the coral paint near my headboard. She gripped the folds of Edward Cullen’s dark denim jacket. They both looked like teens, but

The Many and Various Uses for Mayonnaise The Many and Various Uses for Mayonnaise One little pale fresh tennis ball of rain bounces across my forehead. Fifteen-love. I have very bad posture. An only somewhat inquiring mind. But they tickle me the many and various uses for mayonnaise considering there is only one use for

Justin Torres’ much-awaited follow-up to We The Animals, Blackouts is a meandering conversation between an unnamed young queer narrator and Juan, an older man on the verge of death in a decrepit palace in the desert. At its center lies a book of sexology from the 1930s, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns. The

I don’t remember exactly when I first heard it but it was in high school sometime in the early nineties. I was listening to the radio after school but before my parents returned home from work. Rock music was the sound of my teenage rebellion. It was forbidden in our house so I had one

Author Elissa Bassist is obsessed with the patriarchy. She once texted me, “BENNY needs to go pee, and I need to go tell him he’s a GOOD BOY for PEEING, which is TYPICAL PATRIARCHAL BULLSHIT.”  Reader, Benny is a dog. To read Elissa Bassist is to be in awe of Elissa Bassist. A self-proclaimed “aspiring