Literature

In early 2016, I started compiling a list of books I was anticipating by women writers of color because, as a reader and occasional critic, I was having trouble finding such titles. If I was coming up short, I thought, then others surely were, too, and maybe it would be useful if I published my

Though I am not a horse woman or cow person, I recently found myself writing an American Western. Pity the Beast started innocently enough—as a short story unfolding on a ranch in the northern U.S. Rockies with people in cowboy hats and boots, horses and cows. Westerns are fun to write, and I was hooked,

Growing up, once a year my anneanne (maternal grandmother) would visit my family in our suburban home in Ohio. Before returning to Istanbul, she never failed to stock our fridge with sigara börek, a puff pastry filled with cheese and rolled into the shape of a fat cigarette, as its name suggests. For months after,

Poetry has always existed as humanity’s port in the storm and the keeper of our histories, before and after we began putting language to stone and pulp. I have always been drawn to the lesser known, and even yet-to-be discovered, poets, perhaps because in my mind, poetry encompasses so much more than simply its dictionary

The Thin Line Between a Drill and an Emergency Mark Jacquemain Share article Lockdown by Mark Jacquemain to Caity P. When it happens we’re in drama class, still caring about stuff that doesn’t matter. Like Final Project. It’s nearly the end of semester, so we’re in that stretch that’s all about Final Project. Which is

Victoria Chang’s new collection, Dear Memory, expands the field of the memoir for readers to explore a full-color archive of family photos and historical documents collaged between lines of poetry and letters. It prompts us to ask, with her, What composes a life and what makes of life art? What makes of memory history, and

Written from the perspective of a choral “we,” Brown Girls captures a sense of solidarity among these women, who Daphne Palasi Andreades follows from childhood, into their adulthood as some leave their borough, and eventually the city they first called home. But Queens is always with them, and in the novel’s vignettes, Andreades explores the

Five years ago, on a brisk September morning, I was having breakfast when I smelled smoke. Suddenly, those ubiquitous New York City sirens seemed unusually loud. I checked the hallway outside my apartment; the air was hazy. Frantic, I woke my husband. We evacuated from the sixteenth floor down to the parking lot, now crammed

Iron-Red Tea Were your body a teapot, sleekand slender, face unseenand hands like iron-red stems,were your mouth to release a rooflesswind drawing with smokea lush hissing garden,my me would become a You in myhigh-gorged and fruit-shaped nothingness,eager-handed, wild and triangular,forged in the flame you kindled. Were your body porcelain chinaas I feel it, light, white-glazed,absence

The Asian American women writers in this reading list explore the existential. They seek to do anything but simplify. They live with and write through some very dense, tangled complexities, even mysteries. Some, perhaps many, unsolvable, with wounds that perhaps cannot be closed, not in this lifetime. These are the kinds of writers who continue

This Nice Ghost Can Make All My Decisions Disappearing Act My father gathers the corners of the silk handkerchief; his hands smell of cloying wort from brewing. The colors are shifting, and where was the blue patch and tear I mended those years ago? Every time he folds the fabric it grows larger. Soon the

Photo by simpleinsomnia / Flickr If men and women reappraise the stories of masculinity they’ve received in texts by male authors, we all might better understand the stories we have. In the first version of William Faulkner’s novella The Bear, published in 1942 in the Saturday Evening Post, a ten-year-old boy in Mississippi goes on

For those of us who want to become real writers—whatever that means—the countless resources available can feel a bit dry and uninspired, ranging from tired but true clichés to well-lauded craft books (Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir on Craft sits dustily on my shelf). Many of us find ourselves falling down late-night internet rabbit

One day a friend of mine went on an anti-Covid rant. We were out in public with a big group of people. He began shouting so everyone could hear. “The pandemic isn’t even real! The only people who have died from Covid were going to die anyway! So, they should just die.”  I was dumbfounded.

To Be Young and in Love and Stranded in the Snow Stuart Dybek Share article Cordoba by Stuart Dybek While we were kissing, the thick, leather-bound OBRAS COMPLETAS, opened to a black and white photo of Federico Garcia Lorca—in profile, a mole prominent beside a sideburn of his slicked-back hair—slid from her lap to the

When a fictional Tehran is seized by rolling tremors, the city’s inhabitants are thrown into carnivalesque disarray. As the earth slips and sways, a mother clicks her digital prayer beads between operatic screams, young people rollerblade maniacally amidst scurrying riot cops, and a cane-clad old man guards his precious African violets from the frenesi. Watching

Grandma Craves More Than Fast Food  Filet-O-Fish On Qingming day, bring a filet-o-fish to Nainai’s grave. Beat back the crows coming to steal from ghosts. No weeping. She would’ve said: You can’t wipe anyone’s ass with sad. She would’ve slapped the salt off your cheeks, sent your mole saucering through the sky. Feel cheap about

The holiday season—which I (arbitrarily!) define as beginning in mid-November and continuing through the first of the year—is a minefield. If you’re lucky, the bombs are carbohydrate- or confetti-filled. If you’re not, you’re facing roughly two months of celebratory gatherings and realizing that alcohol, while perhaps a helpful social lubricant, does not actually have the