Literature

It was the kind of summer night we’d been craving all week. Easy conversation, endless beers, suburban life drifting on welcome breezes— “Marco?” “Polo!” screamed from a backyard pool, raucous laughter as someone’s bullshit was called out. Six of us sat in a hot tub: my boyfriend, his sister and brother-in-law, and their middle-aged neighbors.

Tax Incentives for the Brokenhearted Account Because I was the one to end it, and so soon, I offered to reimburse her what I owed. She had covered most of the wedding, the move, our rent. I was living on the grace of a friend, sleeping in his sunroom on Folsom. Every morning I opened

Why is it that, in an era of convenience and online shopping, we still go out of our way to buy our croissants and cupcakes at the mom-and-pop bakery rather than the chain supermarkets? While the custom of buying bread from the baker, meat from the butcher, and cheese from the cheesemonger is an ingrained

In 2005, during the dawn of reality television and before social media transformed these experiments into income-generators for future influencers, I was a participant on a PBS reality television show called Texas Ranch House. Like all reality television shows, this one had its own uniquely unhinged premise: 15 strangers (or relative-strangers—five participants comprised a real-life

Alexandria, 1934. The wedding of the author’s grandparents, Allegra (Freja) Berdugo and Armand (Abdu) Dayan. What of Egypt is left in the children of Egypt’s Jewish diaspora? The daughter of an immigrant reflects on what it means to be “truly Egyptian” in the context of her family’s transnational identity. When my mother is on the

There is something disconcerting about reading the unpublished poems of a great and passed poet such as Etheridge Knight. After all, these are poems the poet might have deemed unworthy or undesirable to share, and to suddenly have them available publicly is revealing. But that’s the thing about being a dead writer; you’ve had your

Author’s Note: I have chosen to publish this essay pseudonymously to prevent retribution from my ex-husband – a very real threat faced by survivors who choose to speak out. I don’t want to be anonymous, and it’s hard not to feel like the byline is one more thing he has taken from me.  But my

It’s the year 2014, and the sounds of “Dark Horse” by Katy Perry echo through your room as you slip on your skinny jeans, inspirational tee shirt, and pink blazer. After a quick spritz of your Viva La Juicy perfume, you reach for your Michael Kors handbag and grab your new Etsy coffee tumbler smiling

Sinéad O’Connor Was Right All Along The Shape of Progress O Sinéad—you are dead & the headlines beside you are all interest rate increases & thermal hellscapes. I am new to the prairie but even the New York Times thinks Duluth is the place to be in the Anthropocene; climate-proof, they dubbed it: ample freshwater

In the following tribute, Yousef Khanfar pens a letter to the eminent scholar Salma Khadra Jayyusi, laureate of the 2021 Palestine Prize for Literature, who passed away on April 20, 2023. Dear Salma, From a native son of Palestine to a native daughter of Palestine, I am writing to you this letter on May 15,

My first encounter with Nigerian horror stories were the Igbo folktales my parents narrated to me in my childhood, each one taut with tension and woven with haunting language that fizzled on their tongues. Years later, those folktales would inspire my debut literary horror novel, House Woman, which follows Ikemefuna, a young Nigerian woman who

Ashley Wurzbacher’s debut novel How To Care for a Human Girl jumps with both feet into the debate over reproductive rights. When two sisters find themselves pregnant not long after their mother’s death, Jada choses an abortion, while Maddie drifts into the sticky embrace of a crisis pregnancy center. Their parallel journey explores the attitudes

Eight months after my dad died, I flew to Anchorage, Alaska. Feeling untethered from my own life in Brooklyn, I left as often as I could. Grief compelled me to be elsewhere, and elsewhere could have been anywhere I didn’t have a memory of my father. On the descent into Anchorage, I peered out the

Photo by Nicolas Winkler / Flickr  To celebrate the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples on August 9, I invited fifteen Indigenous-minority poets from China to record their readings of their own short poems in their Indigenous-minority mother tongues. Most of the languages presented here are endangered. Some may be never heard of, such

A Wax Man Lit a Fire in My Heart Chloe Aridjis Share article Dialogue with a Somnambulist by Chloe Aridjis Winter has the city in its grip and at three forty-five the streetlights crackle back on, throwing a tenuous light onto everything. Lean days, little hanging to them apart from long shadows and stubborn leaves,

At the start of Ben Purkert’s debut novel, The Men Can’t Be Saved, the protagonist Seth’s copywriting campaign goes viral. It feels enough like success that Seth begins to earnestly refer to himself as an “oracle” and rewatches the resulting ad routinely, treating it like a pump that continues to inflate his already buoyant ego.

It’s the height of summer, the sun is scorching and the air is thick with anticipation. Need some fun plans? We’re taking you on an adventure across the world! Whether you’re lounging by the pool or sunbathing on the beach, you get to choose your own reading journey. Check out our personalized map—there’s a book for

As a reader I want a deeply flawed love interest. A relationship that’s doomed from the start. My first taste of the deeply flawed love interest was the Byronic hero. I learned about him in the classroom. I saw him in the many TV adaptations of English classics that occupied my youth. He was brooding,