Literature

For thousands of years, women have been on the fringes of history and mythology. From “The Serpent Queen” Catherine De Medici, evil stepmother Kaikeyi in the Ramayana, and the seductive, church-destroying Anne Boleyn, the few women who have a place in our histories and mythologies are weak, bad, or evil. Recently though, many have started

Aurora Mattia’s debut novel The Fifth Wound is a fantastical journey through the formulation of one trans woman’s truth. Mattia’s own recapitulation as protagonist Aurora aka @silicone_angel bridges the gap between ancient Greece, Covid-era Brooklyn, and the rolling fields of Iowa searching to see herself and her beloveds clearly. Through a combination of memoir, mythology,

In an era of environmental catastrophe, it’s easy to forget that we are the environment too. The world affected by climate change is not some distant place far away in the forest. It’s us. We are as much a part of the world as the trees, the birds, the ocean. If we have any hope

After his wife dies in a sudden car crash, Jimmy Laird numbs his pain for a year. He stays up all night, drinking and doing coke and paying for some kind of company with women. He’s not healing, but he is coping. He tries to stifle his grief, which is so much easier than actually

Jane Wong’s memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City is a feast of a book. It’s about hunger—the hungers of the body, of addiction, of history. Brilliant, gutting, and funny, she writes with such range about growing up in her family’s Chinese restaurant in Atlantic City as their reach for the American Dream slips away. Wong

What even is time? I had a couple conversations this past year, some of them surrounding the publication of my non-chronologically structured novel We Do What We Do in the Dark, during which the concept of “queer time” came up, this idea that LGBTQ people experience time differently, almost four-dimensionally like Vonnegut aliens. We constantly

Children from the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe in Towaoc, Colorado, study the Ute language using new e-learning platform Nuuwayga created by The Language Conservancy / Photo courtesy of TLC On August 9, 2023, the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, WLT editor in chief Daniel Simon spoke with Wilhelm K. Meya, chairman and CEO

Adrienne Brodeur’s novel Little Monsters follows the Gardner family over the course of a summer on Cape Cod, the windswept peninsula—alternately wild and painstakingly tamed—where they have lived their entire lives. Abby Gardner is a painter on the verge of an exciting career opportunity. The tensions with her brother Ken, an aspiring politician who obsessively

I Am a Star in a Galaxy of Grandmothers Study of a supernova at the beach The tulle of my grandmother’s dress like a comet tail, a bouquet of algae tonguing my feet. I track the red sequins of her eyes in the surf. Anything left is mine to love: a spray of sand, ropes

Dr. Cornel West / Courtesy of AAE Speakers Cornel West, who recently retired from Princeton University as the Class of 1943 University Professor in the Center for African American Studies, visited the University of Oklahoma late last week. He was on campus to take part in OU’s Presidential Speaker Series in a point/counterpoint discussion, “Saving

Women get lonely. Men do, too, but there’s something ineffably unique about female loneliness, which is more vulnerable and open to danger than the male version. Female bodies walk through the world as moving targets, rather than as weapons. Perhaps this is why writing on the loneliness of women has a particular haunted quality to

In a cold, cruel city indifferent to your fate, an acquaintance from your hometown can be a lifeline, as can the three guys you happen to bunk with. You feast on donkey burgers and rooftop views of the city. You watch your friends forced out of the city, then befriend others to take their place.

The fictional characters in most campus novels are almost always undergraduates between the tender ages of eighteen and twenty-two. (Think of novels such as The Secret History, The Idiot, On Beauty, The Marriage Plot, A Separate Peace, The Incendiaries, Normal People, etc.) These revelatory stories, underscored by a character’s long-awaited independence mixed with terrible homesickness,

The Real Impact of Imaginary Friends Yiyun Li Share article Such Common Life by Yiyun Li 1. Protein “I thought all children had imaginary friends,” Dr. Ditmus said. Ida, upon being queried a moment earlier, had admitted that she had not had one when young. “Do you mean all American children?” Ida asked. Her Chinese

World Literature Today, the University of Oklahoma’s award-winning magazine of international literature and culture, will host a book signing with Native writers Chelsea T. Hicks (Osage) and Oscar Hokeah (Cherokee/Kiowa) at Norman’s Green Feather Books on Friday, October 13 from 6-8pm. The event—co-sponsored by OU’s Center for the Americas, Department of English, and World Literature

Sure, graphic novels and memoirs are the latest literary rage, but have you heard about graphic poetry? Many contemporary women poets are reimagining the relationship between text and image, offering new ways of representing women’s bodies, and cutting and erasing found texts like they’re slicing up the patriarchy itself. And in many ways, they are.

I seldom promote binaries, but I think it’s safe to say that there are two types of stories at work in 2023’s astounding selection of debut short story collections: those set in far-away realities, and those grounded in our immediate world.  Travel to the Appalachians, Soweto, Port Harcourt, Bangalore and listen closely to the local

“What might this be?” had been a question that, in the course of my thirty-five-year career as a clinical psychologist, I’d posed to clients hundreds of times. It was, in fact, the customary prompt used when administering the “Rorschach,” which is a type of personality measure that calls for asking a patient to look at