Literature

Taymour Soomro’s debut novel Other Names for Love begins with a son flinching at the sound of his father’s voice. Sixteen-year-old Fahad has been ordered to spend the summer with Rafik, his authoritarian father who manages their family farm in Sindh, Pakistan. It’s on the train ride there that Rafik offers up his animating belief:

There’s a scene in Ethiopian-American writer Dinaw Mengestu’s novel All Our Names that I think back on a lot. A white social worker, Helen, living in the effectively still segregated 1970s American Midwest, has decided she is going to make a point (maybe to herself) by bringing her lover Isaac—an Ethiopian foreign exchange student—to a

“Zombies didn’t discriminate. Everyone tasted equally good as far as zombies were concerned. And anyone could be a zombie. You didn’t have to be special, or good at sports, or good-looking. You didn’t have to smell good, or wear the right kind of clothes, or listen to the right kind of music. You just had

Take a break from the news We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven’t read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox. YOUR INBOX IS LIT Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of

Gentrification takes center stage in Cleyvis Natera’s debut novel Neruda on the Park, which follows the different reactions the members of the Guerrero family have to the impending redevelopment of their predominantly Dominican New York City neighborhood.When a neighboring tenement is demolished to make way for a luxury complex of condominiums in their neighborhood, the

Noir has long been obsessed with books—books as objects, as evidence, as repositories of the past, and occasionally as glimpses into other worlds of possibility. It’s no wonder, then, that booksellers often turn up in fiction, and especially in mystery. There’s something intoxicating about the turn a story takes when the characters walk into a

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