Literature

The Only Thing More Humiliating Than Virginity Is Sex Michelle Lyn King Share article One-Hundred Percent Humidity by Michelle Lyn King For dinner, Callie and me stuff our faces with frozen food. Stouffer’s French Bread Pizza, spoonfuls of Reduced Fat Cool Whip, Ham & Cheese Hot Pockets, these health-food enchilada things that Callie’s mom likes.

Parents, siblings, friends, romantic partners, perfect strangers. I’m endlessly fascinated by how other people inform our sense of who we are and our place in the world.  Once in a bookbinding workshop, my instructor told us that sometimes binders used to find personal letters hidden under the endpapers of books—the leaves at the beginning and

My father has been a sea captain nearly all his life. His home in Midcoast Maine is a museum of artifacts; everywhere, ships are imbued in the house. There is the “hall of ships” with photographs and paintings of the many boats on which he has lived and worked. There are kerosene lanterns on block-and-tackle

I can’t be the only one who, when recalling the major contours of my life, ends up also automatically recalling the type of work I was doing at the time. After all, no matter what else might have been happening during a given period—heartbreak, grief, spiritual crises—it is likely that I was still spending the

February can be daunting for those unable to escape the lovestruck couples surrounding them, while others look forward to the feeling of being swept off their feet in the so-called love month. No matter where you fall on the relationship spectrum, you’ll enjoy this collection of international stories displaying romantic relationships, friendship, brotherhood and sisterhood,

Trying on Alternate Selves at the Abandoned Mall Shipwreck The mall my mom took me to in a stroller shut down a shutdown mall is the opposite of a pelican— it feeds nothing with its body dies like a politician, taking servants with him that fountain for pennies is now broke and dry, the atrium

Marisa Crane’s debut novel I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is set outside of our reality: in an America where a cruel form of public shaming has taken the place of prisons. In Exoskeletons we meet Kris, a new mother struggling to see a future for herself and her kid in the wake of her partner’s

The last few months have been an exciting time in the world of publishing, not only for the litany of debut novel and short story collection releases, but also for the publication of two long gestating, highly anticipated projects by Cormac McCarthy and Katherine Dunn. The 89-year old’s first book since 2006’s Pulitzer Prize winning

Davon Loeb’s debut memoir The In-Betweens follows the story of his childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood as a biracial young man growing up between various cultures, races, and identities. Loeb grows up with a Black mother and a white, Jewish father. In school, he is one of the few Black students in a primarily white

Last December, with some hesitation, I posted a personal essay I’d written for Racquet Magazine on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The piece examined why Serena’s retirement from professional tennis, in order to have another child, had prompted an existential crisis for me. Serena and I are both 41, and her sadness around the word “retirement”

I Am My Best Self on Tripadvisor Gunnhild Øyehaug Share article A Visit to Monk’s House by Gunnhild Øyehaug Alcea was the first to write on Tripadvisor. She wrote that she was planning a little visit to Monk’s House, the home of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, in Rodmell, 4.8 kilometers south of Lewes, in East

The fine art world is one of sophistication, wealth, and beauty, a fertile atmosphere for chronicles of intrigue— of artists who will create guileful forgeries for a price, and wealthy collectors draped in gold, who are relentless in their search for rarified artistry. Characters unfold their easels and cultivate their collections in the most glittering

About twenty pages into Sofia Samatar’s memoir The White Mosque, Sigmund Freud appears, sitting in a train compartment late at night. Up to this point, Samatar’s story has been primarily about her travels across Central Asia to study The Bride Sect, a Mennonite group who fled persecution in Russia toward the place they thought Jesus

I’ve struggled with finding belonging my entire life. I grew up 30 minutes outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and spent most of my teenage years jumping from O’Hara Township, a white suburb, to the Hill District, a bustling Black area, and to Puerto Rico, where some of my family resides. In my school district, I was

Nina Simone Reminds Me to Suffer No Fools On the album cover for Black Gold by Nina Simone The afro is omnipresent, like skyline, like the raspiness of its owner, Nina, who is a revolutionary with moveable overtones. Her skin warms the green background and is caressed by musical notes, the longer you look they

What lies in the shadows, just out of view, as we drift through the chilly pits of winter with bare trees casting their creeping silhouettes at night? As long as storytelling has existed, these same long dark nights have inspired stories to explain what ran past the corner of one’s eye, or the rustling of

The resurgence of the email newsletter over the past couple of years is great news for writers. So much of our work requires probing our deepest thoughts in isolation, biting our cuticles, staring at cracked paint on the walls. Whether online or IRL, sharing insights and developing community is essential for survival. Subscribing to newsletters

In our series Can Writing Be Taught?, we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This month we’re featuring writer and educator Abhigna Mooraka, who is teaching a four-week online course on reading hybrid-language prose as writers. We talked to Mooraka about the importance of community,