Literature

Best Friends Are Better Kept Long Distance Kristen Iskandrian Share article Quantum Voicemail by Kristen Iskandrian The visit was proposed during a period in which I was suffering from the tyranny of time. Which isn’t to say I was suffering because I was getting older—I didn’t care about that. I was consistently underestimating how long

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 author and creative writing instructor Mila Jaroniec, who is teaching Catapult’s upcoming 12-month novel generator. We talked to Jaroniec about the importance of reading for writing,

In Allie Rowbottom’s novel, Anna is preparing to have an innovative, high-risk surgery known as Aesthetica™ that will reverse all her previous plastic surgery procedures, supposedly returning her to a truer version of herself. At 35, Anna’s influencer career is long-ended, and she now works behind the counter of a department store selling beauty products

Taylor Swift is having a moment—just ask anyone who endured the presale Ticketmaster queues to try to get tickets to the Eras tour. That’s right: Taylor is heading on tour next year to celebrate all her different eras, from her debut album in 2006 to the newly released Midnights of 2022. If you think her

My Menstrual Cup Will Outlast Us All Blood Cup Shape of a shape, foldable up and able, in, to open out, stay put, collect, beyond my notice, riches I have no further use of. Latex or plastic echo of cervix, funnel without an exit; held up, a wine glass without a stem but with the

You Can’t Tetris Your Way Out of Trauma Tetris I was never good at Tetris. I watch you move the L block, turn it so it fits with I. You don’t know I know you’re trying to arrange memories into an order that makes them disappear. After the desert, after the new scrap metal, after

It’s impossible to create a cohesive linear narrative out of chronic illness. There often isn’t an identifiable starting point, and there is even less often an identifiable stopping point. There are, instead, waves that rise and fall with each episode, each flare, each day spent trying to keep one’s head above water while pain tries

In August 2011, 19-year-old Mac Miller headlined Boston Urban Music Festival, a free show at City Hall Plaza outside Boston’s Government Center. It was the summer going into my sophomore year of high school. From a distance, I imagined how the festival would go down: my classmates smuggling booze in flattened Poland Springs water bottles,

I found my history classes in school to be mind-numbingly dull: just memorization of dates and battles, kings and presidents. Conspicuously missing from the pages of my textbooks were women. To make up for this, I turned to novels, where I found heroines who too often were tormented, passive, wringing their hands over a man.

A Bottle Girl More Flush Than Your Hedge Fund AJ Bermudez Share article Bottle Girl by AJ Bermudez Amy is twenty-one today. (Everyone is twenty-one today.) The club—seafoam green, on the insistence of a long-since-vanquished investor—thrums with the buzz of a thousand bees. Bass as buzz. Flirtation as buzz. Crane-necked/half-verified celebrity as buzz. Neon sign

How do you discuss something so intimate and uncomfortable as finding a spouse, without laughing or crying or cringing in embarrassment or fear? How do you talk about it without using the L-word? As in Luck. As in, you can plan and strategize as much as you want to, you can prepare as if you’re

The memoir Heretic opens with Jeanna Kadlec boarding a bus to the Middlesex County Courthouse in Massachusetts, where she is filing for divorce against her husband, an Evangelical Christian, and pastor’s son to boot. Kadlec is twenty-five and exhausted from the labor of suppressing her queerness. But, as a lifelong believer, she knows the consequences

A woman who lives on my street knocked at my door. She told me and her husband, members of the local historical society, had written a walking tour of our neighborhood, and she thought I might like a copy—it would cost three dollars. I did want a copy. It interests me that in the Vermont college town

The National Books Awards returned in full force on November 16, 2022 for a night of in-person glitz after two years of virtual ceremonies. In front of white tents where the literati gathered for photos on the red carpet, publishing workers with the HarperCollins Union, standing in the cold, handed out flyers and buttons about

I have long been fascinated by books about the early years of the AIDS crisis. Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir from 1988 remains a cherished work; last year’s Let the Record Show by Sarah Schulman and It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful by Jack Lowery provided crucial insights into the world-changing work

Music That Transcends Everything But His Circumstance Jai Chakrabarti Share article Prodigal Son by Jai Chakrabarti Fourteen hours on the plane to Kolkata gave Jonah ample time to feel superior to the other travelers, especially those parents who were bringing along their hapless toddlers. He was traveling to visit his guru in a village that