Literature

When Don Evans, the founding executive director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, contacted me in August 2019 to contribute a piece for the program that honored Sterling Plumpp with the Fuller Award held at the Poetry Foundation, I felt happy that this lifetime achievement award went to Sterling, one of the finest Chicago

In They Said They Wanted Revolution: A Memoir of My Parents, Iranian American author and Vice journalist Neda Toloui-Semnani reconstructed the story of her parents as young, leftist Iranian activists radicalized at Berkeley in the late ’60s and who came to see communism as the political answer to Iran’s monarchy. Her parents supported the 1979

The creative writing of the twenty-first century will be remembered for having sanctioned the passage of text from paper to digital support. But is it really true that the author’s cards have disappeared? And how do contemporary authors write today? To answer these questions, together with the students of the Master’s Program in Publishing at

The gloomy moors of Wuthering Heights are famously vulnerable to the wind—so, too, are the unfortunate families who call them “home.” It’s basically Emily Brontë’s whole deal, right? From the first pages of her only novel, we’re introduced to a home beleaguered by “pure, bracing ventilation … at all times.” And it shows! Trees slant

Malika Moustadraf is a feminist icon in contemporary Moroccan literature, celebrated for her stark interrogation of gender and sexuality in North Africa. “Thirty-Six” is one of the stories in Blood Feast, the complete collection of her published short fiction, forthcoming from Feminist Press on February 8, 2022, translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie. “Thirty-six”

What is it like to break with convention? To go against expectations? To slip out of the mainstream? In my 20s what I wanted most was to write. What I needed most was time. So I took a nightshift job summarizing crime articles. Though I relished escape from the nine-to-five drudge, the inverted perspective of

Popsicles Can’t Fix This New Heat Heat Dome We are slicing fruit and fixing cold sandwiches, swiping mayonnaise on slices of multigrain bread and tearing leafy greens into salads for supper. Of course we aren’t cooking, we’re under a heat dome. It’s nearly 100-degrees in our kitchens, even with the windows wide open and every

(Click here to purchase Swan Huntley’s Getting Clean With Stevie Green, “a quirky, feel-good novel about one woman’s messy journey from self-delusion to self-acceptance.”) Take a break from the news We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven’t read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox. YOUR INBOX IS LIT

Living with chronic illness, whether you are still searching for a diagnosis or long into your own treatment journey, can be a difficult story to chart because there are often complex beginnings and no endings. Every new symptom, doctor’s visit, new medication, and dead-end can feel like false starts and little progress as one learns

When my partner of four years blindsided me with a breakup over the phone, I couldn’t help but turn to my favorite singer, the serially-burned-by-men-via-too-brief-phone calls Taylor Swift. My boyfriend was no Jake Gyllenhaal-esque male manipulator, but when Swift’s re-recording of her classic breakup album, Red (Taylor’s Version), came out three weeks later, it felt

I watched Scream for the first time when I was not quite 10 years old. I can date it so precisely because my parents and I were living in a townhouse that we rented for six months after moving from St. Louis, Missouri, to Huntsville, Alabama, where my father worked as a systems analyst for

In his newest book, What Is American Literature? (Oxford University Press, 2022), award-winning cultural commentator, translator, and editor Ilan Stavans, the publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, rereads an assortment of American literary classics through the prism of the Trump years, from

Everyone’s Sins Taste Delicious Except My Own Jane Flett Share article “The Sin Eater” by Jane Flett Everyone is silent as we stand around the corpse. Galina—the wife, the one who hired me today—is perched by the head. Her hands are folded like bird wings against her ribcage and I can hear the rub of

“Surprising … Rising from the surp. What is a surp anyways?” The narrator of How We Are Translated by Jessica Gaitán Johannesson questions. The Swedish word for “surprising,” on the other hand, translates to “överraskning”—which, when taken apart into “över” and “raska”—literally translates back to English as “to trod over something.” Word games like this

Antoine-François-Jean Claudet, [Multiple Exposures of the Moon] (1846–52), daguerreotype, 2019.47, ​​​​​Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel / Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Queer Exposures: Sexuality and Photography in Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction and Poetry (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), by Ryan F. Long, is an innovative and original text that

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 Jubi Arriola-Headley a Blacqueer poet, author of original kink (Sibling Rivalry Press), and winner of the 2021 Housatonic Book Award. Check out the 6-week generative

I have always held a keen interest toward the processes of myth formation and how beliefs about family identity are handed down through generations. My debut novel Defenestrate tells the story of a family in the midst of reckoning with superstition and inheritance, the long-held beliefs that can shape both the collective identity of a

Completely at random, the world ended.Trade in shares was lively, the weather splendid.Lovers lay in beds and some on the sand.Artists painted nature, if not the lay of the land.Professors wrinkled brows and wrote of weighty things.The season was any season: fall and also spring. The plumber changed a pipe and mended a leak.The bridegroom’s