Literature

On the Eighth Day God Attended a Writing Workshop God Joins a Writing Workshop and the Old Testament Critique Doesn’t Go Well Jason (workshop leader): God, do you want to start by reading a few pages? Maybe get to Wednesday or Thursday of creation and stop there. God clears Their throat, reads. Jason: Thanks, God.

Before my online life orbited around Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, my imaginative play centered on being Mary-Kate and Ashley. The twins were girls like me, except cuter and blonde. A bit older. Certainly smaller, but still, larger than life. They were influencers before the advent of social media. Their empire was built upon their ability

The poems of Chen Chen’s debut collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities possessed the color and intimacy of late-night gossip. Nothing seemed off limits: There were porn stars, superheroes, Kafka references, sometimes all within the same poem.  Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency feels even more

For me, summer is a complicated season. As a perpetual student, summers have always been a release from the confines of a busy semester. In the thick of papers to grade, my own dissertation to write, assignments piling up, I often think that if I just make it to summer, I will be fine. Summer

Ling Ma is one of my favorite writers. Her work is exuberantly uncanny, funny, and full of unexpected emotion. In the middle of amusement or joy or strangeness, Ma will catch you with a shock of familiar grief, a well of deep and personal feeling. Every time I read her work, I realize how insufficient

When my father died by suicide in 2008, I was unexpectedly flung into a personal investigation of his death, and also of the legacy of suicide within my ancestral line. His marked the third suicide in my immediate family: both of my grandfathers had also died by their own hand, a truth that my parents

An Underage Chauffeur Clocks in at Last Call Bojan Louis Share article A New Place to Hide by Bojan Louis There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will. Epictetus When I began driving illegally, as a sort of amateur chauffeur,

Meghan Gilliss’ debut novel Lungfish follows Tuck, her husband Paul, and their toddler Agnes as they all squat on Tuck’s dead grandmother’s island in the Gulf of Maine after running out of money. While Paul undergoes substance withdrawal in the rustic house, Tuck and Agnes survive on whatever the intertidal zone offers up that day—purple

Being human—especially as defined and policed these days (clearly, only certain humans are granted full rights)—is rarely enough for those of us who find ourselves on the margins. As a queer writer of mixed Cherokee and Euroamerican descent, I often reach toward speaking with and alongside plants, animals, topographies, and atmospheres—my “queer kin,” as feminist

The old reading room in Irvington, New York was a glorious Gilded Age folly, filled with heavy wooden furniture cracked by decades of use, opalescent turtleback Tiffany lamps, a card catalog the size of a small car, and piles upon piles of dust. History, constrained safely in the pages of old and untouched books, went

I Am Dionysus Fresh Out of Rehab i admit it i’ve never seen a falling star that isn’t a metaphor. i miss each flicker the way you skirt a train just in time to pillage what’s left behind: crushed coins tucked for luck, to flip or plink a tip. whether wishes squeezed from zinc or

If you follow any writers or readers on social media, you’re probably familiar with the artwork of Christine Rhee. Earlier this year, I started seeing reposted images of Penguin Classics with quippy, tongue-in-cheek celebrity photos. A Property Brother on the cover of Dickens’ Bleak House. Julia Fox smiling maniacally on the cover of Bulgokov’s The

Long before time was measured in the way we mark it now, humans have been telling stories about the animals around them. Animals have been our predators, our prey, and our companions—and yet, modern life has pulled many of us so far from the natural world that it’s become easy to think of ourselves as

Friar4Hire One day, my friend (M/16) comes to me and is like “Dude I just met this girl and she’s amazing and I want to be with her forever.” Clearly he’s coming on a bit strong but his family and this girl’s family have been beefing for ages so I see this marriage as an

On the 9th episode of the 42nd season of Survivor, I began to see double. To be fair, my viewing conditions were shabby to begin with, (my finger-smudged 13-inch Chromebook), but it was during the tail end of that show when my perception split, producing two vantage points of the same episode. I was comfortable

A.M. Homes’ novel The Unfolding takes place over the course of two and half months, from the 2008 Obama election to inauguration day 2009. It follows a wealthy industry titan known as the Big Guy who, dismayed at the election results, summons a small group of powerful friends to his Palm Springs home with a

The Music in His Bones Doesn’t Need to be Heard Joe Meno Share article Beginnings, Endings, and Other Musical Figures by Joe Meno Begin in F♯ minor with a symphony of ghost notes. Why not a concerto that details every known silence? Or the most noiseless overture in all of history? Let the trumpets go mute and