Literature

As someone living with a disability, and a scholar, I have always looked to literature for hope. I have always searched for works that depict the human experience of illness and the power of the written word to get us through life’s adversities. Literature anchored me as I sought to make sense of pain, loss,

The Wonder State, Sara Flannery Murphy’s genre-bending novel, follows five friends as they reckon with a past betrayal. Brandi, now missing, has invoked (with a touch of magic) the oath they all made as teenagers. With her words ringing in their minds—”You promised”—the friends return to their small hometown in Arkansas.  While Flannery Murphy was

Ivy Ngeow grew up in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, and now makes her home in London. An architect and interior designer by trade, she is also a novelist with five books under her belt, the latest a thriller set in Florida. The American Boyfriend is the story of a British Chinese Malaysian single mother who flies

Every work of fiction asks us to believe not only in the story, but also in the story’s telling. Even a seemingly unobtrusive third person point-of-view begs the question—Who is this speaker? Is she part of the story or just an observer? Why is he speaking the way he is? A translated work, too, is

It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Look Down Ann Beattie Share article Nearby by Ann Beattie Midway through the semester, Rochelle stepped in to pinch-hit at the university for a teacher she’d never met, though she hadn’t taught before. CFS, the famous visiting writer claimed: chronic fatigue syndrome. How excruciating it had been, he’d

Photo by Finan Akbar / Unsplash Life Ceremony (Grove Press, 2022) marks the third translation—once again expertly rendered into English by Ginny Tapley Takemori—of recent works by Sayaka Murata (b. 1979) in five years. It differs, however, from both Convenience Store Woman (2016; trans. 2018) and Earthlings (2018; trans. 2020) by being not a novel but

Set in Los Angeles, All-Night Pharmacy follows a young woman who both idolizes and resents her older sister, Debbie, for involving her in drug-fueled escapades that could either, “end with you, euphoric, tanning topless on a fishing boat headed for Ensenada, or coming to in a gas station bathroom[.]” After Debbie disappears, the narrator detoxes

Open Throat wields its language both as a salve and scalpel. The novel follows its unforgettable narrator—a queer, lonely mountain lion living under the Hollywood sign—as they struggle to survive and discover their own identity by watching the humans around them. Observing passing hikers, young lovers, and residents of the nearby encampment from the shadows,

In a work of fiction, place is a character, but unlike mortal characters and their short lives, places are seemingly infinite. Their beginnings are recorded in history books but are distant dawns to its dwellers. We are shaped by place. We fall in love in alleyways and conspire in cafés. We plant our fruits in

Sarah Rose Etter loves to write women with surreal maladies. The Book of X, which won the Shirley Jackson Award in 2019, follows Cassie, a girl who was born on a meat farm with a knot—an actual, physical knot—in her stomach. The knot doesn’t represent any one specific thing, but rather serves as an off-kilter

The age of the boyfriend has ended. Give yours away. Donate him to charity or, if he doesn’t have too much wear and tear, maybe you can sell him on The RealReal. Your girlfriend can be a boyfriend, too. If I’m making proclamations about tired conventions then I’m definitely getting rid of gender. Whoever your

Hey Siri, Cure My Postpartum Depression Dear Siri My son says you’re listening so you might tell us what we want. If so, I want to know what is lost under my fingertips besides home? And whether you understand that I googled postpartum depression after the first year, & I’ve since been bombarded by ads

I was a single parent when I got married on my lunch break. Taking a day off from my unruly job in foster care wasn’t feasible, plus I was pregnant and my health insurance was crap—it didn’t cover office visits or emergencies (or, ahem, birth control). So, after a quick exchange of vows at the

Photo by said alamri / Unsplash Immigration, detention, unequal payare modern words for slavery again. Dictatorship, borders. Any impositionof one’s will over another is a form of slavery.Even the legal rules that enslave: debt, foreclosure,poverty above all. Any compromise of humanityis a form of bondage. Then, what can the Artsdo to liberate anybody? Only this

At 5:15 in the morning, I tiptoe across my kitchen floor and pray it doesn’t squeak in that one spot where it always squeaks. I don’t pray often, but these are desperate times: I have a small child and forty-five minutes to write in solitary silence. With a baby monitor and a cup of coffee

Today, the Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust announces the shortlist for the second annual Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. The recipient of the $25,000 prize will be chosen by authors William Alexander, Alexander Chee, Karen Joy Fowler, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Shruti Swamy from nine nominees selected by the Trust. Last year Khadija

Roman floor mosaic with scene from the Odyssey / Photo by Jamie Heath / Flickr In Homer, Humanism, Holocaust: Jewish Responses to the Crisis of Enlightenment During World War II (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Adam Goldwyn, a prolific scholar of Late Antiquity and Byzantium, has focused his attentions on a different set of keywords and written