Literature

Stars and Stripes and Racist Imperialism No History Is Immune From Ends, but the Americans Were Infinite To the times that call for candor, hunger. Mr. President, what was the sound before surrender? It’s almost summer. I sit across from a white woman in the student union cafe who wants to adopt a child from

Encompassing a wide range of genres from historical fiction to fantasy to poetry to investigative journalism to memoir, this exciting abundance of books published in 2023 by emerging and acclaimed Native writers speak to the rich diversity of the Indigenous experience. From meditations on the lasting impact of climate change and the destructive legacy of

Dewaine Farria belongs to the world. As a US Marine, he served in Jordan and Ukraine, and spent much of his professional life working for the United Nations Department of Safety and Security (UNDSS), with assignments in the North Caucasus, Kenya, Somalia, and Occupied Palestine. In June 2013 Dewaine was awarded UNDSS’s Bravery Award for

A Doomed Romance Is the Deadliest Tragedy SJ Sindu Share article Patriots’ Day by SJ Sindu Four days before his death, Amit Srinivasan files for divorce. He’s living in a tiny apartment in Somerville that he began renting in December, ever since his wife packed a suitcase full of his clothes and burned it in

Fall, the season of sweaters, PSL, and—of course—haunted houses.  Though the Victorian clapboard house will forever remain iconic, the past few decades have broadened our scope of what can be haunted. 2022’s Barbarian, for instance, introduces a humble Airbnb, while Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör is set in a very familiar Swedish furniture store.  What ultimately binds

Elle Nash’s novel Deliver Me tells the story of Daisy, a Southern woman in her 30s seeking control over her life. Daisy struggles under the thumb of her partner (a petty criminal with a sexual fetish for exotic bugs), her mother (a domineering matriarch who wields the evangelical church like a weapon), her job (a chicken slaughtering

Photo by Alexander Grey / Unsplash Welcome news to those of us in the “Flyover Zone”: our reading habits are healthy and well served. The Jackson Madison County Public Library in Jackson, Tennessee, is one such example. Possessing 115,799 physical items and over one million electronic books, it is one of the larger West Tennessee

Safiya Sinclair writes in her memoir How to Say Babylon, “The perfect daughter was nothing but a vessel for the man’s seed, unblemished clay waiting for Jah’s fingerprint.” The memoir, Sinclair’s first, is about her journey to shaping a future that isn’t limited by the idea of the perfect daughter or Rastafari’s tenets. Raised in

Imagine if the suffering chef of The Bear were physically becoming, well, a bear. Imagine if in his journey through grief, he landed in a kitchen of not only underdogs but a family of warring brujas. This comes close to the mythopoetic realm of Brendan Shay Basham’s debut novel, Swim Home to the Vanished, which

Fall is a huge release season for books. Indie bookstores across the country are jam packed with new titles, and every Tuesday, even more hit the shelves. It’s an exciting time for publishers, booksellers, and readers alike, but so many new books can also mean it’s hard to know where exactly to turn your attention.

For a long time, I’ve described my writing as “spooky literary”—the term that seems closest to the pulse of this genre-muddling category I love so much. “Spooky literary” books have ghosts or monsters or werewolves, and they also have complex characters and gorgeous prose. They have moonlit swamps or dark New England woods or shadowy

Back in the ‘80s, crack was a boogeyman come to life. It played on the minds of neighborhood kids like bible stories, seeming to make real the supernatural myths of demonic possession from Sunday School. It could animate the body with strange ticking motions, or deplete users into life-sapped stupors. It obliterated one’s sense of

Memory is a tricky thing. For one, not everyone will have the same memory of the same event. For another, you can do so many things with it—you can forget it, you can suppress it, you can warp it (intentionally or unintentionally) and so on. In his memoir, A Man of Two Faces, Viet Thanh

Love Is a Stone That Won’t Sink So Long, Oblivion Like a dollar I am depreciating all the time. Like a lighthouse throwing the net of my pretend moon on the predator shoreline. Like an invasive boar I have been known to root and roll in rain and dirt and roam. Like the earth sometimes

When you hear the title Brooklyn Crime Novel, you might automatically think of genres involving mystery — whodunnit, noir, hardboiled, detective fiction, etc. — and plots driven by investigation. You might think of specific titles such as The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, The Black Dahlia, The Feral Detective, Gun, With Occasional Music, and perhaps

Craft is often thought of as the backbone of literature, the scientific and mathematical side of the creative process that examines an artist’s techniques. In prose, it often involves terms such as plot, pacing, point of view, characterization, scene-setting, structure, dialogue… It is the rational breakdown of those mechanisms that work behind the scenes in

We live in a moment where debt invokes the crushing weight of student loans, medical bills, mortgages, and all the other unsustainable systems that scaffold our world. These debts hang over us, invisible, exerting pressure and power over our lives, yet even in contemporary literature, with few exceptions, many fiction writers tend to overlook the

If You Were Dead, You’d Be Obsessed with Death Too Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi Share article Extinction by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi On a balmy summer day in 2019, at the tender age of twenty-five, I left Los Angeles, that angel-less city of angels, with the intention never to look back. As the