I had early inklings that my relationship with alcohol wasn’t healthy—when I turned to addiction memoirs, things only got worse. When I started drinking—champagne at a party with my parents, when I was 14—I was not thinking about preventing my own addiction. I was not thinking about how addiction has popped up in numerous branches
Literature
Sara Lippmann’s debut Lech is a difficult to describe, marvelous contradiction of a novel. It is, in the author’s own words, “quiet,” and yet Lech takes an unflinching look at some of the worst, most dramatic parts of human nature—addiction, voyeurism, abuse, antisemitism, violence. Ultimately a narrative driven by characters in various stages of crisis,
Ever since I joined a friend for a Sunday school class as a kid, I have been fascinated by the concept of Hell. No, Internet, this is not Confessions of a Teenage Satanist. My fascination was neither in fear nor rapture, in either direction. It was logistical. The idea of there being a place somewhere
There’s No Praying in the House of Horrors I Pray in Screamers House of Horrors Part of me was still on the party bus with the estranged branch of my family. Part of me swallowed a wavy strand of the Niagara Falls. It rappelled down my throat like coloured scarves, each knot a repentance, resentment
By definition, an elegy is a lament for the dead (usually in the form of song or poem). By design, Namwali Serpell’s latest novel The Furrows is also a lamentation, one expressed through the eyes of two characters, both intertwined by circumstance not necessarily fate as one would assume. At age 12, Cassandra Williams loses
It is only in the Philippines that I feel my individual identity disappear in the eyes of others: in a society that sees people in terms of their kinship ties, rather than their individual achievements, I am a daughter first, an adult woman second. Living abroad in my twenties gave me some clarity about the
Guess I’m a Bad Jew. That’s the same refrain I give when I sprinkle cheese on tacos or forget the second verse of the kiddush. This line is repeated across the Jewish world so consistently that it feels like an ontological category, an objective measure of a class of Jews who simultaneously embarrass our people
Countless reports from credible individuals suggest that something shocking may be stalking the woods of the southern United States—something massive, bipedal, and covered in hair. Tales of these Southern Sasquatch creatures—such as the one made famous by the 1972 horror movie The Legend of Boggy Creek—date back to the very origins of Deep South history and
On May 13, I finally got to read my wayward science fiction story “It Is the Voice That Unnerves Me” in The Dread Machine. I had been submitting the story since the spring of 2019, and had thought many times about consigning it to the “retired” list. I knew every word, sentence and section break
Let us begin with the traditional greeting of Nice Girls: omg, hi!! Thank you for being here! As a lifelong Nice Girl, I need to be clear: I don’t wish to rid myself entirely of the trappings of “niceness.” I’m more than happy to hold the door for you. Yes, I’ll share my fries. However,
My Mother Rearranges Strangers’ Lives in the Dark Samanta Schweblin Share article None of That by Samanta Schweblin We’re lost,” says my mother. She brakes and leans over the steering wheel. Her fingers, slender and old, grip the plastic tightly. We’re over half an hour from home, in one of the residential neighborhoods we like
Every culture and age has an image of “ideal womanhood,” an idea that, at its most benign, filters down to truisms and expectations on women should behave. As a reader, I’m drawn to characters who are struggling at the edges of what society expects them to do, bursting at the seams to express themselves. Not
Werner Herzog can’t move mountains, but he once came close. In one of the most iconic and mind-blowing sequences in movie history, he pulled a steamship over a mountain in the Amazon jungle for his film Fitzcarraldo (1982). A lesser director would have used special effects, but not Herzog. Watching this singular scene as a
In the opening pages of Saturnalia, Nina deals herself The Drowning Girl from a divination deck, a symbol that suggests either death or renewal is looming. While Nina doesn’t believe in the fortunes she reads for her clients, today is different. It’s Saturnalia, a time for celebration, debauchery, and a flirtation with the supernatural at
I’d Like to Report Myself Not Missing Excerpts from “After the Rapture” by Nancy Stohlman Before the Rapture, a bad thing happened, and the people were horrified, and they cried, and they played the details over and over like a particularly painful heartbreak. And someone decided that a memorial should be built, and everyone should
Since I was a child, I’ve been captivated by stories of the paranormal. Growing up in an environment rife with real-world terrors, I commiserated with the haunted, longed for the transformative power of magic, and read books on the occult as if they were maps leading to hidden doors of unseen realms. Not much has
Fatimah Asghar’s debut novel, When We Were Sisters, braids lyric and and narrative vignettes into a tender, vivid, heart-aching story of three orphaned sisters and the world they create together, the great beauty and stunning pain of that belonging. The book follows Kausar, the youngest, from early childhood into adulthood, her voice captured at every
Prince Shakur’s debut memoir When They Tell You to Be Good starts with an argument between him and his mother which recalls the image of his father’s murder, a man he never got to know. In unflinchingly honest detail Shakur traces his own journey of self actualization as a queer, Black Jamaican man growing up
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