Literature

I have to admit something: I don’t really like dark academia. As a PhD candidate in English, the reality of the academic world feels dark enough. I don’t usually want to read about murder mysteries at elite liberal arts colleges or Oxford secret societies with a shady side. Being an adjunct, worrying about health insurance,

The 1800s is an intriguing era to explore with fiction. It is not so far in the past as to be unrecognizable to a modern reader. And yet it is removed enough from to present that one will inevitably notice curious differences.  Among the curious yet profound differences in the 19th-century Western world is the

Growing Up Is the Deadliest Summertime Sport Asja Bakić Share article 1998 by Asja Bakić She’d planned to stay home with her mother that summer until her father and sister returned from the European Junior Table Tennis Championships in Italy. Instead she spontaneously took a bus trip to Jablanica Lake with her friend Anida. Anida’s

I can’t remember the first time I went online, but I can remember the first time something happened online. It was during the summer holidays, and I was 12 years old. Seated at my software engineer uncle’s home computer—the first dial-up I’d ever experienced—I noticed little grey boxes popping up every so often to say,

On the flap of Wayne Koestenbaum’s 1993 book The Queen’s Throat, Koestenbaum promotes the idea of an obvious connection. “Until now, silence has surrounded the long-observed affinity of gay men for opera.”  I close the book and put it back on my shelf, bewildered. What affinity? Who’s observing? As a gay man myself, I wonder

For now, at least, the immigrant narrative endures as the most legible depiction of the Asian American experience. You’ve heard this one before: the first generation struggles (but mostly successfully), the next one triumphs (but mostly ambivalently, with not a few pungent lunchbox casualties). On TV and in our book clubs, we now have what

Take a break from the news We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven’t read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox. YOUR INBOX IS LIT Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of

It took thirty minutes for the first man I hooked up with after my spinal-cord injury to say he’d come over. I was usually rejected within ten. My bad habit was to offer too much, too soon—about a haphazard gait, the brace on my left leg, anomalies I couldn’t conceal. But with practice at least

It’s January and you know what that means—a reset for your TBR pile! There are so many amazing books to look forward to in 2023, but before we get too far into the new year, I think it’s worth spotlighting some of the titles you might have missed last year. And 2022 was an incredible

Sometimes a book comes along that’s so bracing and fresh, I feel like the writer has pushed me into a swimming pool. Rebecca Rukeyser’s debut, The Seaplane on Final Approach, is one such novel, and because the prose style is so keen, I fear it won’t be served well by my summary—but here goes anyway: Seventeen-year-old

Introduction by Halimah Marcus Adina Talve-Goodman had the kind of exuberant, playful, perfectly weird personality that made you want to be in cahoots, to follow her around town and maybe start a comedy duo or do a low-stakes heist. For me, that mostly manifested as attaching myself to her at literary parties. I remember a

Jean Kyoung Frazier’s debut novel, Pizza Girl, appeared in June 2020, at a time when authors were still learning how best to reach readers in the midst of a pandemic. Despite those difficulties, the novel quickly became a critical success and a fan favorite, and a feature film based on the book is currently being

A Love That Will Bury Me Alive Patricia Engel Patricia Engel is the author of The Veins of the Ocean, Vida, and It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris. Share article The Bones of Cristóbal Colón by Patricia Engel The caretaker calls from the cemetery to tell me Joaquin’s skull and most of his larger and

Literature is a place where we can grapple with the unsavory habits of humanity and think through the causes and effects of how and why people act the way they do. I am interested in—and haunted by—the capacity of people to betray the ones they love. My book, Judas Goat, looks at betrayal from a

On January 22, 2023, a new moon anoints the Lunar New Year, the Year of the Water Rabbit. If you aren’t familiar, the Rabbit is one of twelve animals used in Chinese astrology to chart the universe’s energy, our place within it, and the unique opportunities and challenges we should expect. For writers, the Water Rabbit

I love reading about work, probably because it’s more fun to read about jobs than it is to actually do them. Not that I haven’t experimented with a variety of ways of earning a paycheck. I started my work-life in high school as a cart collector and grocery bagger at the supermarket in my hometown,

When Frank Cotton opens the Lament Configuration in Hellraiser, he is disappointed. He was told that doing so would expose him to pleasures wholly unknown to him. Instead, he finds himself greeted by four grotesque entities—one has jeweled pins stuck at even intervals atop their head and another is later revealed to have a horribly

If you are a debut author or a literary fiction and nonfiction stan, you’ve likely heard of Debutiful. Adam Vitcavage launched the podcast and website dedicated to highlighting the work of debut authors in January 2019. It has since become a beacon in the literary community, helping over 100,000 readers discover debut books. It’s one