Literature

I have always been drawn to the uncanny, to the strange that doesn’t feel strange, to the stories that can frighten us at the same time that they reveal the brutal truths of our realities. As Lydia Dietz says in Beetlejuice when asked why she can see the spirits of the dead, “Live people ignore

How to Build a Dad Out of Bricks A riddle in which were they heavy or were they bright My father was a bag of bricks my mother carried around, stone enough for foundations but stubbornly refusing to become a building. My father was a right pallet of bricks of the opinion that buildings were

This year, Scotland is host to a year-long celebration called A Year of Stories 2022. A celebration of the great storytellers of Caledonia that have set the world ablaze, we will, of course, be harking back to classics like Robert Burns, Muriel Spark, and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as the more recent likes of

How do I start this story about friendship and relationships and the power of a good book? If I were any younger, I don’t think I would be able to write this story at all. It’s about my friend Susan and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.  It’s about carrying grief for the past quarter-century.  It’s

In her first book, Beth Macy chronicled how the Sackler family, through Purdue Pharma, used deceptive marketing tactics to push healthcare providers to prescribe opioids. If Dopesick, now also a Hulu miniseries for which Macy served as writer and producer, offered a gripping answer to the question of how the US was plunged into the

A Landlocked Parisian Swims in Her Fantasies Barbara Molinard Share article “Happiness” by Barbara Molinard Clarisse de Karadec, née Desanges, hurried to the table; the deed to her house was there, where she’d put it the night before, amid the various papers and the enormous heap of envelopes. God, she’d been scared! Joyously she embraced

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