Literature

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

Growing up in the early 1980s with an obstetrician-gynecologist mother, one would imagine that I would be well informed when it came to issues like puberty, reproduction, sex, and sexuality. Instead, I was quite sheltered and restricted when it came to these topics. As the child of Indian immigrant doctors, we didn’t talk about any

Writing addressed to a specific “you” generates an effect unlike the electricity of classic second-person narratives. Instead of a jolt, direct-address writing delivers a subtler charge, like opening someone else’s mail or overhearing one end of an emotionally raw monologue.  While drafting The Skin and Its Girl, I found myself adrift in a storyline that spans 200 years

Plant Care Is Self-Care How to Befriend Houseplants Watch the accompanying video directed by Josh Sondock & Sam Cutler-Kreutz. Click on images to enlarge. Take a break from the news We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven’t read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox. YOUR INBOX IS LIT Enjoy

London has served as the setting for many a novel—the backdrop to tales of scrappy orphans and drunk, dancing thirty-somethings, of marmalade-adoring bears and magical nannies. It’s also, of course, the setting for so many love stories.  Not quite as romantic as Paris, nor as hustle-and-bustle-y as New York, London sits somewhere in the middle,

Some of the best moments of my life have been spent in libraries, first as a patron, later as a librarian, and I have witnessed firsthand how hard the past few decades have been on libraries. As America has continued to dismantle its social safety net, libraries have been forced to pivot from being a

As LGBTQ+ literature continues to evolve and incorporate more diverse experiences into the canon, it’s such an interesting time for romances featuring bisexual leads. There are f/f stories, m/m stories, stories with nonbinary leads and love interests, and, of course, m/f, the often overlooked branch of the bisexual tree. And with that widely varied combination

A Prayer: A Libation to Our Sisters “Ori is coming from Heaven to Earth If my head is behind me, I will be successful in this world.” -Ogunda Meji 1 Before you were born, your spirit lived at home with us. We were close—a bond that could never break. Played patty cakes and breathed in

The books on this list explore the challenges faced by women from diverse backgrounds as they fight against patriarchal structures such as religious sects, border controls, and even humanity. Their battles take place across wide-ranging landscapes as territories act simultaneously as sites for confinement, flight, connection, creativity, and evolution. The women in these stories use

The Only Thing We Have in Common Is Sweaty Desperation Jon Elofson Share article Percent by Jon Elofson We met at the apex of a New York heatwave via an app designed to facilitate anonymous sex between gay men. The sky was low, touching the trees, and the sun refused to set. It was early

We never learn the name of the protagonist in Anna Metcalfe’s debut novel, Chrysalis, a detail that feels fitting in a book that is in part about how much—or little—we can ever truly know about the people who populate our lives. We experience the protagonist from the perspective of three different onlookers: Elliot, a man

When I was a teenager, my uncle Jesse Ausubel decided to count all the fish in the sea. He’s not crazy. The Census of Marine Life, which Jesse conceived of with a colleague one July afternoon in the late 90s, is the story of the oceans, past, present, and future. It was an unprecedented ten-year,