Literature

In school, my favorite books were either banned or censored from my school and public libraries. Books like Stephen Bantu Biko’s I Write What I Like, Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy, and George Jackson’s Soledad Brother. I learned something blandly boring and yet extraordinarily potent in those books: Black folks’ tall and full humanity could be

Photo by Chris Ensminger / Unsplash Wolf Food (prologue) by Marina and Sergey Dyachenkotranslated by Katie Kassam In this prologue to a science-fiction novella, Волчья сыть (Volch’ia syt’), the reader is introduced to many oblique references that hint at the wider society and history crafted by the Dyachenkos, as well as the true nature of

Photo by Evelyn Paris / Unsplash National Anthem This is my room, itis called Iceland. A sea cable fastensit to Europe and to here andfrom here fly airplanes withtheir ink cartridges full of people. Here I dwell in a matchboxthat I care for, deeply –I even painted it on the insidelast winter. Life carries on

We Are Gathered Here Today to Eat, Drink, and Be Ruthless Christine Sneed Share article Wedding Party by Christine Sneed 1 It was the bride’s second marriage, the groom’s third. They were both in their thirties, but Kim wasn’t sure if the groom was fibbing about his age—half of his face was hidden behind a

Women’s achievements have long been overlooked in the annals of history, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of science. When I first began digging into the history of nineteenth-century geology for my novel Our Hideous Progeny, I was shocked to find how many women were actually working in the field, considering

A cover is all about disclosure. A cover may encase a book but its purpose is to encourage readers to pry open its pages. A cover is as much an invitation as it is a revelation. This I’ve long understood in the abstract, but it wasn’t until the design proofs for my own came in

Horror is queer. I don’t make the rules.  From the moment Carmilla sprang onto Laura’s bed to when M3GAN murder-danced her way down the red hall, the horror genre has been dominated by queer icons—and loved by queer audiences as well. While the subtext-entrenched classics remain iconic, the past few years have inspired explicitly queer

One school morning in 2012, I woke up at home and alone. Everyone else was on holiday and I stayed behind by request. The class activity that day in high school was a debate about abortion. I was excited to participate – argument formulation was a strength of mine, and anything beat having homework. Regrettably,

For 17 books, Luis Alberto Urrea has highlighted the joys and sorrows of life along the U.S.-Mexican border, a territory which moves with its peoples, no matter the walls we build on the land and in our hearts. Through his memoir Nobody’s Son, novels like The House of Broken Angels, his essay and poetry collections,

The Bluest Crab at Grandpa’s Funeral The following story was chosen by Anthony Doerr as the winner of the 2023 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. The prize is awarded annually by Selected Shorts and a guest author judge. Subscribe to Selected Shorts wherever you get your podcasts to hear this story performed by an actor in

Penelope Schleeman never thought she’d write a bestseller, but she’s trying to make the most of it. In the wake of her debut’s unexpected success, she departs her teaching job for Hollywood in order to adapt American Mermaid for the big screen. But as her co-writers’ suggestions tug and twist her beloved protagonist’s story further

In The Skin and Its Girl, my writing about Arab identity is driven both by a rich personal and cultural storytelling tradition and by a perhaps-endemic Arab American anxiety about how our stories are told in the West. I inherited, without really knowing I was inheriting, an existential comfort in the storytelling my jiddo saved

Katie Kassam and Vala Thorodds, winners of the 2023 Student Translation Prizes World Literature Today, the University of Oklahoma’s award-winning magazine of international literature and culture, has announced the winners of its annual Student Translation Prize.   Katie Kassam and Vala Thorodds were recently named the recipients of the sixth annual translation prize for students sponsored

Romance blooms and ages alongside us, developing crow’s feet and laugh lines to mark the time spent in love, as well as muscle aches and twinges as tokens of time spent unrequited. As a romantic, I live for all the stages throughout this evolution of young romance to seasoned. There are the first times as

Bullshitting Our Way Through a Long Beijing Summer Xu Zechen Share article On the Rooftop by Xu Zechen, translated by Jeremy Tiang My head throbbed and I felt a bright bird bursting from it. Having broken its metallic body free, it flapped its wings harder and harder, gleaming silver in the late afternoon sun. If

When I was very sick, using the bathroom 17 times a day and buckled over with abdominal pain, I never would have imagined writing a poem about my illness—much less an entire book. As a teenager I was so embarrassed and afraid of my body that I couldn’t even speak to my closest friends about

To say that Gina Apostol’s prose is pyrotechnical is to state the obvious: juggling an immense cast of characters, decades of political entanglements, and Apostol’s trademark brand of humor, La Tercera dazzles. I was floored by how the novel somersaulted between multiple languages, the personal and the national, overacted tragedy to heartbreaking history, the U.S.