Literature

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

If you’re queer and have watched And Just Like That you probably remember the picnic scene. In “Diwali,” episode 6 of the Sex and the City reboot, Miranda Hobbes, Charlotte York, and Carrie Bradshaw meet for lunch in a park along the East River. All is well until Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) reveals that she had

Accept Irrelevance! You’re Being Replaced! Alexandra Wuest  Share article The Replacement by Alexandra Wuest The news comes in the form of an email. YOU’RE BEING REPLACED, the message says, and I glance around the office. The typists are typing, the copy machine is copying, and the shredder is shredding. The room looks like the type of

Belinda Huijuan Tang grew up listening to her father’s stories of his ancestral village in Anhui, but as she writes in the author’s note of her debut novel, it wasn’t until she moved to China in 2016 that she began to think seriously about the one story he never told: “how the man who’d raised

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by mother-daughter narratives in literature. At times, it bordered on obsession. I consumed anything and everything that promised to explore the distinctive and singular ways that mothers and daughters can hurt each other. It is the tug-and-pull nature that intrigues me most—the mother’s ability to

Solar power. The end of war. Gender role reversal. Dirigibles. First published in 1905, Rokeya Hossain’s short story “Sultana’s Dream” is steampunk avant la lettre, strikingly advanced in its critique of patriarchy, conflict, conventional kinship structures, industrialization, and the exploitation of the natural world. Notably speaking to the concerns of our contemporary world as much

You Can’t Trust a Skinny Messiah if jesus was fat they wouldn’t’ve been able to hoist him up on that cross / all the paintings got his ribs showing, the contours of his stomach undulating from emptiness / a growl heard through centuries of canvas / enough to make you hungry just looking at him

One of the central questions I had when shaping my story collection, Proof of Me, was how to invite into it a unified feel, how to place each story to be in conversation—geographically, thematically, linearly—with what follows. I also sought for each story to stand on its own, offering a microcosmic glimpse into the lives

Words can, and often do, fail. For Zeina Hashem Beck, a poet and polyglot of three languages, words can, and often do, fail—threefold. This, she says, isn’t a dead end. It’s an invitation. “The words will come when it’s time. And I trust that,” she tells me via an email from Dubai. Hashem Beck’s newest volume

Addie Tsai’s novel Unwieldy Creatures is a queer, contemporary retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein set in Indonesia and the American South. The novel explores the transgressive nature of existing as a queer body, an “unwieldy creature,” in a society whose obsession with bodily perfection and beauty serves as a tool for reinforcing heteronormative standards of

On the day that Jimmy arrived, I was convinced that I was going to die. I caught H1NI three days before my thirteenth birthday, and it was early enough in the Swine Flu epidemic that my small-town Ontario doctor hadn’t seen it before and wasn’t sure how to treat it. Stomach bug symptoms came first.

When my best friend and I first saw the apartment, we loved it. We thought it a little strange, a tad bruised, but overall it felt right – and it was a good price and we needed to move quickly. When you rent a basement apartment in New York City for the price, you don’t

My Palm Reading Says I Will Die Alone Jane Campbell Share article “On Being Alone” by Jane Campbell Her fine white hair stood out around her head like a gauzy halo framing the sunburnt face. A lifetime of African sunshine had left so many creases in her skin that she looked as though her tiny body