Literature

One of my favorite stories about my great-uncle, Tío Roy, involves an argument he had with his first wife. (Or maybe she was his second. Or one of his girlfriends. My late tío had a long and interesting life.) Tía Whomever was complaining he spent too much time with his family and away from her—admittedly,

I grip the dark vial, hold the measuring spoon out in front of me. “Black Cohosh,” the label reads. I look at my laptop screen.  Tincture: ¼-1 teaspoon, 3–4 times a day.  The root is the part used. My tongue recoils from the bitter taste. I put the dropper back in the bottle and set

The novel Perpetual West explores how hiding our secret, most authentic selves from those we love can plunge us into a world of loneliness and precariousness. A young married couple, Alex and Elana, move to El Paso from West Virginia, neither of them quite knowing what selves they carry within. Alex, adopted from Mexico by Christian missionaries,

Kafka Has Nothing on the New York Unemployment Office Initial Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessment At the unemployment office, we all wear heavy coats or grip them to our chests as though we’ve been instructed not to lose them. I got an email, I explain to the security guard, referencing a letter I never received.

Think of a university quad crammed in the center of a huddle of gothic inspired university buildings, topped with gargoyles and arching spires. Think of roaming the dimly lit library stacks, and catching a coven of students steeped in the most expensive brown leather and tweed, planning sinister acts. A disappearance, a mysterious campus murder,

My third novel, The Force of Such Beauty, follows a retired athlete who marries a prince—a Common Princess, in the parlance of the quiz. Over the almost five years that I spent drafting it, I read dozens of princess stories for research, from sensationalist unauthorized biographies of real-life women like Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles

Both of my parents died when I was in my early twenties. I was still immersed in their friend group at the time, as well as close with my extended family and two siblings, so I saw a range of reactions firsthand. It was as if the deaths happened differently for each of us. I

Tess Gunty’s debut novel The Rabbit Hutch follows the inhabitants of a low-income housing complex, called the Rabbit Hutch, in Vacca Vale, Indiana. It’s a loud novel, full of many voices, since there are many inhabitants of the Rabbit Hutch, some of whom we know by apartment number and some by name: four young people

When I was to leave Beirut to study in Norwich, I distinctly remember the depth of concern in my mother’s words: Վստա՞հ 3 տոպրակ զաաթարը բաւարար է ամբողջ մէկ տարուայ համար? You sure 3 packs of za’atar are enough for a whole year? I also distinctly remember not knowing how to respond to the various

If You Didn’t Wanna Get Evicted, You Shouldn’t Have Ruined My Life Sidik Fofana Share article Tumble by Sidik Fofana Usually, they give you time. You might see a notice on someone’s door for the whole year. Now, several units were getting one on the same day.  So less than a week into my time as a

When I was first starting out as a writer, I didn’t know other writers like me existed. All I knew was that in poetry, I had found a space to which I could bring my whole self. I was unsure at first; it took years of unlearning the urge to translate myself and undoing the

“…the plan had run out of control. But rather than reveal this, the technocrats had decided to pretend that everything was going according to plan, and what emerged inside was a fake version of society. The Soviet Union became a society where everybody knew what their leaders said wasn’t real because they could see with

In Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility, Michelle Tea chronicles her path to pregnancy and motherhood as a 40-year-old, queer, uninsured woman. The tone is irreverent, the storytelling is hilarious, and the topic—choosing to exercise one’s reproductive freedoms—is extremely timely. Tea’s journey is full of ups and downs, from a series of insemination

Helen of Troy Battles Southern Hospitality helen of troy makes peace with the kudzu my father foxholed me in the lee of the porch, gloved and hungry, ready for battle, straining at the leash until he launched me into the yearly war. i sprang at them, the tendrils threatening the house, the little questing outriders

War operates like a disease. Only those who have personally experienced it know its toll. For them, they will suffer from the pain of it, and stay up all night praying to God to be healed from it. Warmongers never talk about the costs of war, and so it falls to brave writers to reveal

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 feature Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, a writer and translator from Japanese. Check out her 4-week online literary translation workshop. We chatted with Hofmann-Kuroda about very long bike rides

Sneha, the 22-year-old protagonist of Sarah Thankam Mathews’ debut novel All This Could Be Different, is the dutiful immigrant daughter. Despite the long recession, she bagged a corporate job right after college, and a free apartment in Brewers Hill, Milwaukee. She regularly sends money home to India and is also working toward a visa sponsorship.

Before my first Asian American Studies class, my last semester of college, I thought my brown ass was white. Nowadays, I credit ethnic studies—from CRT to Beyoncé—for making me a person of color.  When I tell people this, they seem neither shocked by my delusion nor appalled by my POC betrayal. They seem, TBH, kind