Literature

In the summer of 2018, my friends and I established a ritual. On Monday nights at 8 pm, we gathered in my sweaty living room in Brooklyn, drank cheap wine, and watched Becca Kufrin as she embarked upon her journey to find love in front of millions. We were joining the ranks of a long-storied

Photo courtesy of the author A late winter storm and a decaying Chevy Suburban underscore the emerging fragilities of life in their seventies for a writer and her husband. We bought the Suburban in 1993 when we built our cabin in Wyoming. We summer here. Instead of sweltering in Miami, we escape the heat. I’m

The City Can’t Replace Her Best Friend Ada Zhang Share article Julia by Ada Zhang When she was twenty-two she used to spend what little money she could have saved on hardcover books, lattes, and croissants. She read in cafés alone and anonymous, with no reason except to offer the world a glimpse of her.

A lot of folks say that they don’t like poetry. Which is fair. It’s easy for poetry to lose touch with society. Many poems—or authors—are stagnant, stiff in formalistic structure and removed from modern language. Even worse are those pieces that are so strange and esoteric that they almost seem masturbatory. But that’s not what

Aaron Hamburger’s stunning new novel Hotel Cuba imbues the immigrant story with love, sadness, and compassion, breathing new life into the classic genre. This richly detailed book, set in 1922, is the achingly beautiful story of Pearl, a sober young woman fleeing the chaos of the Russian Revolution with her lovestruck and romantic younger sister.

In Delia Cai’s debut novel, family drama meets romcom meets small town politics. Central Places begins in New York and follows Audrey Zhou’s return to rural Illinois so her parents can meet her white fiancé, Ben, over the holidays. The Zhou family is one of the only non-white families in Hickory Grove, and Audrey’s return

Isobelle Ouzman, Peace for Ukraine (2022; detail), miniature plain paper journal, ink, color pencils, art knife, glue / isobelleouzman.com / By permission of the artist What’s the best book gift you’ve ever received? To help launch “The Future of the Book” issue of WLT, tweet us using the hashtag #BestGiftBookWLT. You can also enter your

Reddit, Tell Me Where I Went Wrong AITA for Repairing My Neighbor’s House? My neighbor (32F) is not speaking to me (44M) because I made some repairs to her home while she was out of town. These were mostly exterior and relatively minor (clearing debris, replacing deck boards, adding a utility sink, installing a rain

Bookstores are safe havens for readers. They offer quiet places to flip through novels, chances to meet your favorite authors, and opportunities to form community with people who might just love the same niche subject as you. I often find myself stopping by my favorite indie shop to splurge on new nonfiction or buy another

I used to have a lot of misconceptions about what made for compelling literature. Of course, a novel peppered with references to critically acclaimed texts and high-brow films and classical music—or just things generally held in high regard—are commonplace. But as someone who enjoyed pop music, not as guilty pleasures but as something worthy of

The Pulitzer Prize isn’t the only major literary award, but it is the one that seems to get the most attention.  The Old Man and the Sea. To Kill a Mockingbird. The Optimist’s Daughter. The Color Purple. Lonesome Dove. Beloved. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Gilead. The Road. The Goldfinch. The Underground Railroad.

Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma offers no easy answers when considering the art of wrongdoers. Across thirteen chapters, Dederer unpacks the complex legacies of a variety of artists—Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, J.K. Rowling, Picasso, Michael Jackson, and many more—with unfailing wit and nuance. Threaded throughout this exploration of genius, creation, and monstrosity is her

It had been four years since the air had hit me like this, heavy and warm. Coming out of the airport felt like stepping back in time, everything concrete, tinged with green. I was in Malaysia, a place that feels like home, although I’ve never lived there. I’d been deprived of my childhood tropics since

Jewish Museum Berlin / Photo by Davie Dunn / Flickr Mommy, mommyrepeated Tyre Nicholswith his last breathskicked by the bootsof five policemenunder his mother’s window in Memphis Please let me gomy mommy doesn’t know where I ambegged my seven-year-old cousin Beniocaught in Lviv in August 1942while they were taking Beniofrom his doorstepthey were murderingseveral thousand

My mother was born and raised in Istanbul, then moved to the U.S. alone when she was twenty-four years old. Turkish, like many Middle Eastern ethnicities, is not white, nor is it part of a large minority group in the United States. It is a hazy, ambiguous ethnicity that feels stuck between two continents and

Turn Signals and Turn-Ons at the DMV Katherine Heiny Share article Chicken-Flavored and Lemon-Scented by Katherine Heiny Colette has been a driving examiner for twelve years—she’s thirty-six—and yet it only occurs to her today that Ted Bundy had had a driver’s license. And that means that some driving examiner had taken him for a road

We live in an era of precarious conflict: highly-fragmented, hyper-connected, the world both smaller and painfully far apart, in combat geographically, and with our own bodies, from rogue cells to drone wars. Evie Shockley’s suddenly we is a visually exciting, linguistically dynamic, and altogether thrilling shapeshifter of a collection that is both a response and

Top row (left to right): Sholeh Wolpé, Idra Novey (credit: Jesse Dittmar), Alina Stefanescu. Middle row: Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Cleyvis Natera, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke (credit: Stan Lim). Bottom row: Fabienne Kanor, Romeo Oriogun, Alexandra Lytton Regalado. World Literature Today, the University of Oklahoma’s award-winning magazine of international literature and culture, has announced the names