Literature

Another day, another shit show involving J. K. Rowling; I’m starting to think there’s a schedule.  I’m not a Potterhead, so I have no skin in this game, but I’ve seen enough friends and loved ones in the last couple of months lament the loss, in their words, of nothing less than their entire childhoods—childhoods

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 Rachel Kincaid, a fiction writer, reporter, and cultural critic. Check out her 3-week online nonfiction seminar on exploratory writing. We talked to Kincaid about writing

Today, the Ursula K. Le Guin Trust announces the Shortlist for the first Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Prize. The prize honors a book-length work of imaginative fiction with $25,000. The nine shortlisted books will be considered by a panel of five jurors—adrienne maree brown, Becky Chambers, Molly Gloss, David Mitchell, and Luis Alberto Urrea.

Iconic drag queen RuPaul was the first person to introduce me to the concept of chosen family. I was 18 and in love with the captain of my college swim team. Having been raised Catholic in the conservative Midwest, I had almost no context for my new self-discovery. I didn’t know anything about Stonewall, or

There’s No Home but There Is a Family Gina Berriault Share article “The Overcoat” by Gina Berriault The overcoat was black and hung down to his ankles, the sleeves came down to his fingertips, and the weight of it was as much as two overcoats. It was given him by an old girlfriend who wasn’t

Laisvė, a character in Lidia Yuknavitch’s new novel Thrust, is in the water a lot. Water serves as a conduit for her to move between space and time, a power she uses to save other beings from manmade terrors like a ruined earth and an ever-encroaching police state. In the not-too-distant future in which parts

I tightened my fingers around the clipboard, blinking as the letters and numbers on the page moved further away. I had never believed stories of tunnel vision, but fuzzy shadows invaded my peripheral vision. As my shoulders curved inward—my natural reaction when spasms wracked my abdomen—the volume in the room spiked.  “Andria!” My assistant grabbed

Let Me Tell You About All the Men I Beat Up Hook I was a boxer before he met me / blood soppy / after a match on the curb, before he carried me / home / in a cardboard box, my knees on the ridge & wet feet dangling out. I was a boxer

How does the story go? Human man walks into a strange home. Human man gets into trouble with the owner of said home, a monstrous creature with claws, fangs, and fur covering his entire body. Monster makes a deal, bartering the human man’s freedom in exchange for his beautiful human daughter. Human girl, though she

In theory, most assistants are on their way to becoming someone bigger. Head coach. Full professor. Editor-in-chief. A more experienced colleague passes down critical know-how while you, the newbie, build up the skill set needed to advance in the organization. That’s how it’s supposed to work at least, but sometimes things go sideways. You’re not

The world has been getting weird for a while, and in the process the distinctions between reality and fiction, utopia and dystopia, individual and environment have themselves come to feel strange. In her new essay collection, Death by Landscape, novelist and critic Elvia Wilk asks what we mean by “weird” in the first place and

A year ago, my spouse and I abandoned the small northeastern town we’d lived in for more than two decades and moved to a different small northeastern town. Our official reason for moving—the elevator pitch to friends and family—was financial; our original house was suddenly worth more than twice what we’d paid for it, the

Chris Belcher’s searing memoir about her work as a professional dominatrix isn’t exactly a comfortable read. Not because of the subject, but because Pretty Baby asks more of the reader than many memoirs. Like the best art does, this book invites introspection and interrogation of both our own lives and society at large.  Belcher grew

Forget Cashmere and Angora, Buy 100% Human Hair Sayaka Murata Share article “A First-Rate Material” by Sayaka Murata It was a holiday, and I was enjoying chatting with two girlfriends from university days over afternoon tea. Through the window, the gray office buildings of the business district sat beneath a cloudless sky. Reservations at this hotel lobby

Safia Elhillo’s much anticipated second poetry collection, Girls That Never Die, spins an incredible lyric around gender, body, desire, and control. The book yearns for a quest to be free, while living in a world where the body is policed by so many forces: womanhood, community gossip, changing countries, racism, islamophobia, language, self-censorship, secret love,

Before we begin, I must confess to my bias. I am not an objective reader, so in some ways I have already failed. A few months before I read Elif Batuman’s debut novel The Idiot, I had a conversation with a friend that unlocked a safe in my brain. After, there was nowhere I could

Most writing about the climate crisis focuses on large-scale events like extreme weather, wildfires, and flooded coastlines—and for good reason. Such events impact the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. But how might the crisis affect us in smaller, more intimate ways? How are we seeing it manifest at the level of a life,

The Existential Crisis of a Merciless Siren Murder Mermaids Make Mistakes Some of the mermaids wanted to kill him, but their orders said to bring him alive. It wasn’t supposed to matter that they didn’t know what he had done— I kind of might like to know. Some of us are curious. It helps me