Literature

Angie Cruz’s latest novel How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water is a study of a class of forgotten women: the 55 to 65-year-olds who lost their jobs during the Great Recession and were never able to regain long-term employment. Cara Romero is one of these women. When the factory where Cara has

Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel, Best of Friends, explores how a long, complicated friendship is shaped and tried in tumultuous political landscapes. Maryam and Zahra are unlike in several respects—the families and social classes they come from as well as the values they intend to live by could not be any more different. Yet, in ‘80s

The summer after our college graduation, a few friends and I decided to pool our money together and find a stage big enough for our real lives to play out on. We set our sights on leasing a temporary apartment in Atlanta with a self-imposed move-in deadline of early August. The hope was to reclaim

Moms are weird. Scary, even. You were inside her. She’s still inside you: seeds of dysfunction planted by even the most well-intentioned, over years of clumsy tending. She was a mere mortal, suddenly transformed into a minor god, blessed with raw human material and challenged to shape it into something as close to perfection as

Mom’s Ghost is Trapped in the Mouth of an Alley Cat Nick Otte Share article Eau de Mims by Nick Otte Mims has been complaining a lot lately that Jodie’s breath stinks like dead fish left too long on a hot stoop. She’s not wrong, but I’m tired of hearing about it, so I tell

Being young is an embarrassing thing. I say this as a former young person myself. The worst of it is your teenage and early adult years when you’re trying to figure out who are you. The easiest way to do this is to find out who you’re not. I am not an athletic jock, so

Hollywood’s perpetual hunt for literary IP, or intellectual property, has given audiences an ever-expanding library of book-to-film adaptations—some exhibiting more intellect than others. Without the proper care and insight, a book undergoes a flattening effect when transferred from page to screen, as nuance and ambiguity are smoothed over into something that’s easier on the eyes,

The Most Exclusive Cruise in the Apocalypse Here’s the pitch. Pretend you had to sell it, this life you’ve been given. Watch how quickly the term thyroid goiter becomes scenic esophageal overlook. Hypertension becomes a live demonstration of the heart’s amazing high-volume pumping capacities! You must take up embroidering the truth with the same fervor

It’s difficult to say anything that hasn’t already been said about Torrey Peters’s debut novel, Detransition, Baby. It won the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a national bestseller, a NYT Notable Book, and named a Book of the Year by more publications than my word count limit will let me include. Not only is it an incredible

I was fifteen when my mom announced that we’d be moving to the US because she had a new job there. My younger brother was not thrilled by the prospect of the move and tried to negotiate a way to stay in Nigeria, perhaps with relatives or friends. I, for my part, was ecstatic, my

As an editor and writer working in an industry that has historically failed to integrate (or even acknowledge) disability experiences, I was thrilled to receive an announcement that the Ford and Mellon Foundation had selected this year’s recipients of the only national fellowship devoted to supporting disabled artists.  The Disability Futures Fellowship supports twenty disabled

It’s been 3 years since our last masquerade, we’ve missed you all and we are so ready to party. Yes, it’s official: the Masquerade of the Red Death is returning. This year, it’s on October 21 at Littlefield in Brooklyn.  If you want to know how to come to the party, you can find out

On her first day at an American high school, the protagonist of my novel, Hira, faces a dilemma. She considers herself well-read, but as she rifles through a thick textbook in her English Literature class, she realizes that none of the American authors in there are familiar to her. It is 2010, and she has

“All worlds, fabricated or not, are equally real. And so they are equally unreal,” says Agnes, the narrator of The Book of Goose. Yiyun Li’s newest novel is a propulsive and provoking exploration of what it means to create a world through words—not only that, but what it means to co-create. The Book of Goose

A major part of my life before turning to writing was my immersion in classical music. I trained to become a professional violist, and performed in orchestra and chamber music groups for years. Although I ended up on a different professional path, classical music infuses my writing and provides the soundtrack for my prose. My

Only an Oil Tycoon Could Ruin This Friendship Adam Soto Share article Wren & Riley Wren was leaving New York to live in Wyoming with a white man named Riley. Yessenia and Junip, her friends and business partners, told her not to go. Not because Riley was white but because it was Wyoming. “I mean,

In Emi Yagi’s Diary of a Void, Shibata, a Japanese woman in her thirties, has had enough of making coffee, doing menial tasks, and enduring sexual harrasment at her workplace and declares that she is pregnant. This announcement results in an immediate turn of affairs, namely her being treated much better by her co-workers since

Jordan Peele is an increasing rarity in Hollywood: a writer-director of original genre films who releases box office smashes every few years. He does what op-ed columnists and anonymous studio execs tell us is impossible: get people in theater seats. If you have somehow not seen Peele’s latest, Nope is a neo-Western that explores visibility