Literature

In 1995, I left the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle to teach English in Vietnam. Around that time, my friend and fellow bookseller Janet Brown traveled to Thailand to teach as well. There was no email then, and overseas phone calls were a luxury. So we wrote to one another, meditating on the countries

The title of La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind caught my eye instantly as I scrolled through the lesser-known corner of Instagram known as Black Bookstagram. On the white cover, I made out the silhouette of the shoulders and head of a Black figure whose head is adorned with

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 Jason Schwartzman, an essayist, and fiction writer, and author of the memoir No One You Know: Strangers and the Stories We Tell. Check out the

The Chickens Will Inherit the Earth Zoë Ballering Share article “Ark” by Zoë Ballering On the 152nd day, after a spate of double-crowing at the crack of dawn, Naamah appeared in my doorway. Although she was a normal-sized woman, I had a shoebox-sized cabin, the smallest among any of the handlers, and I had the

In the biblical Exodus story, before the enslaved Israelites escaped the Pharoah, Moses had his own personal exodus. After striking and killing a sadistic Egyptian slave driver, Moses, terrified, ran away, exiling himself to the desert. He struggled with his identity, feeling othered and alienated while away from home, so much so that he named

Sean Singer’s poetry collection, Today in the Taxi, could easily be described as as a vivid portrait of ride-sharing in New York City in the years leading up to the pandemic. At heart, however, these poems read like unaddressed letters sent to help us navigate an unsettling modern world. While driving a taxi in New

The Garden of Pain Needs a Good Hard Freeze A Snowy Day The snow fell first as childhood longing, small as a soap doll’s Ivory curls, blown from paring knife to floor. A few crescents was all there were: on eyelashes, making it impossible to see, another landing bitterly on the tongue, hushing it, dissolving

Matthieu Aikins’s olive complexion, dark hair, and ambiguous features means that he is often mistaken as a local in Afghanistan and the Middle East where he has lived since 2008. In his non-fiction book The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, the Japanese Canadian journalist goes undercover as an Afghan refugee to accompany his interpreter and

For those that might still think of New York as “The City That Never Sleeps,” I have some bad news: that title should most certainly belong to Seoul. You see, there is no last call in Seoul. And while the capital of South Korea might only have around one million more residents than New York

Spring is the sweetest time to discover new poetry. Lingering daylight and blossoms, the chance to open a book on a park bench and be transported, briefly, to a heightened world. Each spring, I find myself gravitating towards collections, both intimate and bold, that wrestle with identity and history, desire and self-definition. Poetry opens up

When I was in my early twenties I watched the movie “Annabelle” with my cousins and brother. It did its job in discomforting me, but I’ll never forget what my brother said as he watched, bored, eating popcorn, and checking his phone. “After all our ancestors went through, there is no way they’re just going

Eloghosa Osunde and Okwiri Oduor. Photo of Oduor by Chelsea Bieker. It’s hard to argue with Booker Prize–winning author Damon Galgut’s assertion that 2021 was “a great year for African writing.” And as WLT’s “New African Voices” issue helped make clear, 2022 is shaping up to be one as well. Here, then, are two debut novelists

In Claire Kohda’s Woman, Eating, the protagonist Lydia, a 20-something Londoner and artist, is a frustrated foodie. She salivates over the idea of the delicacies of her Japanese father’s homeland, and reads labels of food with interest and desire. But for all the intent, Lydia can’t eat or drink—she is a vampire and can only

I Believe the Man in the Attic Has a Gun Budi Darma Share article “The Old Man With No Name” by Budi Darma Fess Avenue wasn’t a long street. There were only three houses on it, all with attics and fairly large yards. Drawn there by an ad in the classifieds, I moved into the attic room

In the past few years, as I’ve been working on my own book about technology, I’ve been reading books about technology—critiques of Silicon Valley, of internet culture—and wondering: where are all the people of color? Sure, Silicon Valley is known as the home of the tech bro—a white man, probably wearing a Patagonia jacket and