Literature

List of Totems in the Air A broken wine glass, a Chinese radio,trees looking on undaunted as I grow old,scraps of bitter lemons,a staircase patiently awaiting the daywhen I can no longer climb it. Here I reign. Like the earthworms,I transform words into nitrogen,and thus build my homeland out of refuse, scraps,living in air saturated

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 Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, a poet, writer, and asemic artist whose debut collection Dereliction is forthcoming from The Song Cave. Check out the 5-week online generative

Mine is the story of the woman who thought she was making a book about others; realized only as it was about to be published, that she was the broken one the book talked about. The fragmented, the dispersed, the uprooted.  When I was editing the anthology Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature

I first read Carley Moore’s Panpocalypse while in line to get a COVID test during the early days of the Omicron surge. I had expected the wait to be long, but not four hours long, and the book kept me excellent company: both riveting and poignantly, painfully apt. If the long wait felt like a

Someone’s getting arrested. Is it you? Are you white? Are you or your parents rich? Is your name Richard, or perhaps Edward? Are you or are your parents rich? Did you go to a good school? Are you upper middle class? Is your name Rick or Ed? Are you generally a decent guy who gets

A Kyrgyz Soviet tomb / Photo by Evgeni Zotov / Flickr Consider Friend, when you visit cemeteries, don’t be afraid.All the dead are Kyrgyz, and most of them you know.Over here is Kerim. You knew him well.And Karakoichu. Alym. Bekish. Sabyr. And the others . . . You’d better kneel and recite the Quran.Read to

Who doesn’t love a creepy house? When the wallpaper is peeling and the floorboards creak, it summons up everything there is to love about the Gothic genre. The atmosphere, the vibes, the feeling of being trapped in a place that is home but doesn’t quite feel welcome. Or maybe… maybe it welcomes you with a

In Sensorium by Tanaïs is, at once, a sensuous and gut-wrenching experience in expansive memoir that bleeds across genre and time. Using perfume as a framework, Tanaïs builds the work slowly, moving from the base to the heart to the head notes, recounting alienation and life on the margins as a Brown Muslim growing up

I’ve always been intensely fascinated by Antarctica: the huge white continent at the bottom of the globe which is the coldest, windiest and driest place on Earth. It inspires a sort of horror vacui, a fear of all-encompassing isolation and whiteness that might find its place in a Herman Melville novel. My debut novel, All

Yanyi shows me his SAD lamp within the first two minutes of our interview. He’s somewhere in Vermont and I’m in Brooklyn, and the sky is gray from both our windows. He tries to impart some of his manufactured sunlight to me, via Zoom, so neither of us descends further into a chasm of guilt

Years ago, I had a conversation with another writer, Allison Wyss, about the utter unfairness of being trapped in a single timeline, a single life. I had no interest in life extension, but life expansion—all the things at once, “Garden of Forking Paths” style—was becoming an obsession. And she responded that she thinks story was

Lotion the Walls Or Else Kate Folk Share article “Moist House” by Kate Folk The house needed moisture. So Karl was told. He sat in a landlord’s office in a strip mall off the interstate. The landlord, Franco, was known to rent out houses that were undesirable as a result of their peculiar needs and

Photo by Yahia Lababidi There comes a time in one’s life when—to reflect, heal, and grow—one must retreat from the world. Middle age, naturally, is a stage of turning inward, and our global pandemic afforded us all an opportunity of enforced mass meditation, whether we felt that we needed it or not. With the increasingly

Who would’ve thought academia involved house break-ins and over-the-counter drug hallucinations? In Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel, Ingrid Yang is struggling to finish her doctoral dissertation on Xiao-Wen Chou, a famed Chinese American poet—or so she thinks. Disorientation takes us on a whirlwind romp that combines academic satire with a who-dunnit mystery thriller. Chou extensively

The day of the incident it had been only me and Ms. Roberts at the circulation desk. I was one month into the job and used to calling these kinds of things “incidents” by then. The yelling was coming from the Adult Fiction section, an area with four tables that made up the far-right corner of the larger

I’ve always had a thing for strangers. I’m that person who can’t mind my own business at an airport gate, who strikes up a conversation with whoever looks as famished for connection as I feel. I love the gaping sense of aperture you feel among people in transit—how safe it is to tell a cab

12 Essential Makeup Tips for the Aging Ghost 12 Essential Makeup Tips for the Aging Ghost Apply lipstick to your dead mouth to bring it back to life. Quirk one side of your mouth up in a smirk. Trace your invisible lips once more, a touch too full, a touch too vivid. A red, rotting

Epistles to the Children I am writing to the copiers,to those who whisper to each other in fear,to those who scratch their loves into the tables.To the latecomers. To the ones who gazethrough windows. For those who forgettheir notebooks. For those who fall asleep in their seats.For those who don’t know the answers.For she who