Literature

Shelly Oria’s new collection, I Know What’s Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom, is the latest in a string of new anthologies that reclaim and challenge the conversation surrounding reproduction. The collection deals with the choice of whether or not to have children, and also explores surrogacy, trans pregnancy, a medical establishment rooted in

The first time Ma told me was my last semester of college. I was in Providence. She’d moved back to Taiwan for good when I left the suburbs for Brown. One winter night, at the movies by myself, I watched Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The hero, a whiteboy, copes with the double abandonment of

My Cartoon Turtles Say What I Feel Lydia Conklin Share article “Laramie Time” by Lydia Conklin  Maggie and I had been living in Wyoming for three months when I finally agreed we could get pregnant. We were walking on a boulevard downtown over snow that was crunchy and slushy by turns, heading home from a disappointing lunch of

Once, during a tense graduate school workshop, an older, venerable professor lambasted a student’s paper as being “too sentimental.” The student asked what the problem was with sentiment, to which the professor replied, “It’s not the sentiment. It’s the sentimentality.” These words were meant to settle the argument. Sentiment was fine; sentimentality—and the overabundance of

In Either/Or, Elif’s Batuman’s follow-up to The Idiot, Selin is now a sophomore in college, returning to Harvard after the summer she spent chasing her aloof crush, Ivan, to Hungary. Now Ivan has graduated and Selin is left searching for a connection to him, which, in his absence, she finds by analyzing their past interactions

Spring has finally sprung, and you know what that means—it’s reading in the park season! But with so many great new releases to choose from, how do you decide which one to keep in your tote for spontaneous outdoor reading when the sun peeks out? That’s where I come in. Read on to find out

There is a certain kind of horse girl who likes their horses imported, warm-blooded, and tacked by someone else. I am not that woman, and my horse people aren’t, either. When I decided to return to horseback riding as an adult on a freelance writer’s budget, I touched a pitchfork long before a saddle and

Is My Husband Having an Affair With Me? The Complex It’s a warm Sunday afternoon when I notice myself moving in. Through the window I watch me, in my favorite exercise gear, carrying bags and directing movers across the building’s central courtyard. My husband uses a trolley to shift boxes, his navy cap shielding his

The most elusive prize for poets of any kind, at any time or place, is endurance. It’s not something poets can specifically work toward or ever claim for themselves and, if achieved, it may not even be in their lifetimes. To capture that elusive quality of being a poet who endures is up to many

In the hills of Appalachia, my mother volunteered at a crisis pregnancy center where she offered desperate women diapers, ultrasounds, and prayer. These centers were associated with our church, set up to offer assistance to women tempted to seek abortions. I was born into a fundamentalist Christian family in the socially conservative state of West

Naheed Phiroze Patel’s debut novel Mirror Made of Rain follows Noomi Wadia, an indignant young woman raised in a Parsi family in India, through a world that is keen to control women and safeguard long-established pecking orders. Since her childhood, Noomi has had a difficult relationship with her mother Asha, who battles severe alcohol dependence.

The design department at the tech company I worked for was suffering from a morale problem. Management saw the writing on the wall; our big happy work family was on the verge of a smashup. One afternoon, we received an email from the director informing us that the company was excited to offer a new

From the opening sentences of Lan Samantha Chang’s novel, The Family Chao, we learn that Leo Chao, the patriarch, was not a good man. He was aggressive and domineering, and an unfettered capitalist. He carried many desires, and he satiated each of them, all while owning and operating a restaurant that capitalized on feeding the

Adopt a Cat for the Global Collapse Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi Share article “It Is What It Is” by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi  Khorshid, whose name in English translates to Sun, arrived from Canada on a dreary February morning. I had been warned that she wouldn’t answer to Sun because her family only

What does it mean to be displaced from your homeland? How are families broken and remade? When people lose everything, how do they find the will to survive? Both vast and intimate, Tsering Yangzom Lama’s riveting debut, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, begins with the Chinese invasion of Tibet in the 1950s, when

Writing my first poetry book As She Appears was a journey for me as a 41-year old debut poet—I was waiting to find poets like me, who were queer and Asian American. It was a careful writing over a decade, as I considered all of the ways that women—Asian American women, Chinese American women, queer

I had a friend—we’ll call her Kinsley—who was as close to me as a sister for nearly 20 years. As we grew older, our values began to differ, but we both agreed that no difference was profound enough to break our friendship. Kinsley married a man she met on a religious website, sending me a

Where’s Waldo of Eternal Damnation The Butt Song from Hell One section of Hieronymus Bosch’s massive triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, depicts a hellish chorus singing a song painted on the buttocks of a sinner. -io9 i. Of course Jesus is there in the garden already looking into the distance at what comes next