Literature

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

A few years ago I started writing this novel called Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World, which is a love story set in a bad dream about America, and you can, if you’d like, guess how it ends. At the time, I kept thinking about the idea of the world

In Chilean Poet, Alejandro Zambra’s main character Gonzalo goes from being an acne-stricken teenager in love with Carla and poetry to a middle-aged professor. Along the way of this intensely energetic novel, translated by Megan McDowell, we see Gonzalo reunite with Carla, who at this point has a six-year-old son, Vicente, an adorable little fellow

The novel Groundskeeping takes places in the months around the 2016 presidential election. Aspiring writer Owen Callahan moves back home to live with his Trump-supporting uncle and grandfather in rural Kentucky where he takes a job trimming trees at a local college. In exchange, he enrolls in a free writing course. Over the semester, Callahan

In 1982, Alice Sebold, an 18-year-old freshman at Syracuse University, was brutally attacked during an evening walk in Thornden Park. Though Sebold reported the crime to the police, they were unable to identify a suspect until five months later, when Sebold spotted Anthony Broadwater while walking down Marshall Street—not far from the scene of the

In the new year, during a period of great upheaval in my personal life, amid the many great upheavals in all of our lives, I told my wife that I needed to watch The X-Files again.  For my money, The X-Files is the most important show in the world. Not the best—the most important. When

The Ice Pop Lady Rules the Neighborhood Ladee Hubbard Share article “Flip Lady” by Ladee Hubbard History: Raymond Brown hears the sound of laughter. He puts down his book and looks out the window. Here they come now, children of the ancient ones, the hewers of wood, the cutters of cane barreling down the sidewalk

Lychakivskiy Cemetery in Lviv, Ukraine / Photo by Jennifer Boyer / Flickr So many words; they are like crippled ghosts!They strike, like bullets, far and close byBut always miss the essence of my life;They come in rows.Through these deceitful words I walk and shamble.There is a fight; I’m on the battlefield,Where all my soldiers are

Flint, my hometown, and Detroit, where I live now, are both underrepresented in literature and disproportionately burdened with the narratives of outsiders. The usual story, the dying city narrative, goes something like this: cars, white flight, deindustrialization, poverty, blight, undrinkable water. This story usually comes with familiar illustrations: ruin porn pictures of abandoned houses picked

The largest collection in English of Romanian poet Ana Blandiana’s work, Five Books (Bloodaxe, 2021) displays her lifelong project of expressing liberty and love. The winner of the European Poet of Freedom Prize (2016) and the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry’s Lifetime Recognition Award (2018), Blandiana shows her oeuvre’s full range of form and

Even before its publication, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, Melissa Febos’ fourth book and her first on craft, has reignited conversations about the impulse to write—and silence—stories of violation and trauma. But Body Work is not a manifesto for literary suffering. It is an articulate call for understanding writing, especially autobiographical writing,

Benjamin Murphy, 100 Years of Progress (2021), oil on canvas, 72 x 48 in. / By permission of the artist but the day arrivedwhen exhaustion broke my faceand i was more than bad,i was dangerous. all said poor thinglike future,like a world shut downfor the good of all. so much disappointment was betrayal. i knew

Is there anything more alluring, more full of curiosity and adventure, than a map? Inside every one waits a wondrous tapestry of beautiful landscapes, familiar and unfamiliar names of cities and streets, and an invitation to explore and imagine. Since childhood, I’ve found it nearly impossible to resist the urge to pore over every map

Devour My Blackness While I Sit Here Hungry I want to commercialize your pain Hear me out: I watched the... presentation? performance? thing? What do you call that there? Is there a name for what you do? Anyhow, it’s good stuff. Really feisty. One could even say..... “powerful.” I’d like to capitalize on your.... “feminism.”

In his debut collection The Gleaming of the Blade, Christian J. Collier resurrects a history that was never truly buried for the Black men whose lives continue to be shaped by its violence: “Trauma builds its monsters from the bones of experience. Blood records & remembers everything it survives.” From persona poems that assume the

At the risk of seeming obnoxiously obsessed with ourselves, writers and readers do tend to love books about writers and readers—especially when those fictional writers and readers behave badly. (It’s no wonder, really, why the Bad Art Friend discourse hit a nerve; so many people were frantic with empathetic outrage or gleeful schadenfreude.)  In my

Qian Julie Wang’s debut memoir Beautiful Country is a compelling and intimate portrait of  an undocumented childhood. Much like Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, we are carried into the heart and mind of a child: this time, a young, undocumented girl in 1990s New York City who shows