Literature

About twenty pages into Sofia Samatar’s memoir The White Mosque, Sigmund Freud appears, sitting in a train compartment late at night. Up to this point, Samatar’s story has been primarily about her travels across Central Asia to study The Bride Sect, a Mennonite group who fled persecution in Russia toward the place they thought Jesus

I’ve struggled with finding belonging my entire life. I grew up 30 minutes outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and spent most of my teenage years jumping from O’Hara Township, a white suburb, to the Hill District, a bustling Black area, and to Puerto Rico, where some of my family resides. In my school district, I was

Nina Simone Reminds Me to Suffer No Fools On the album cover for Black Gold by Nina Simone The afro is omnipresent, like skyline, like the raspiness of its owner, Nina, who is a revolutionary with moveable overtones. Her skin warms the green background and is caressed by musical notes, the longer you look they

What lies in the shadows, just out of view, as we drift through the chilly pits of winter with bare trees casting their creeping silhouettes at night? As long as storytelling has existed, these same long dark nights have inspired stories to explain what ran past the corner of one’s eye, or the rustling of

The resurgence of the email newsletter over the past couple of years is great news for writers. So much of our work requires probing our deepest thoughts in isolation, biting our cuticles, staring at cracked paint on the walls. Whether online or IRL, sharing insights and developing community is essential for survival. Subscribing to newsletters

In our series Can Writing Be Taught?, we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This month we’re featuring writer and educator Abhigna Mooraka, who is teaching a four-week online course on reading hybrid-language prose as writers. We talked to Mooraka about the importance of community,

The legacy of race and class constructs can be seen in access to education, health, jobs, and more.  Race and class can intersect and compound discrimination by the mere fact that racial discrimination affects the distribution of wealth and other resources, which leads to social stratification. Set in 1980s Mississippi, my novel, Wade in the

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