Literature

Growing up in Center, North Dakota—a town with 600 people, no stoplights, and boundless grasslands—Taylor Brorby quickly understood that the coal his family members mined kept him housed and fed even at the expense of his home. But this is all too often the way of the American West’s prairies, a place marked by its

It’s not just public catastrophe, like the HIV or COVID-19 pandemic, that drives us to write. A private catastrophe, one just in our own body, can do the same. In 1976, Susan Sontag sat dying or not dying, and she wrote. Sontag had cancer. She wrote about cancer in Illness as Metaphor. She wrote as

The first thing Grant Ginder did when we met on Zoom was apologize for his dog being a freak. This was fortuitous, because I was interviewing him from home and my dog is also a freak; I was primed to preempt my dog’s barking once he finished snarfing the peanut butter out of his Kong.

No Depth Can Bury the Family Guilt Nathan Harris Share article “The Mine” by Nathan Harris A boy has died in the crypt. (I’m told this is what they call the bottom of the mine, now: the crypt.) Benji, my surveyor, has come to tell me the news. As he stands before me, I notice

Astrology is having a moment, thanks to the phenomenon of Astro Poets, Chani Nicholas, and Jeanna Kadlec. Some of us use it to understand ourselves and our habits, or to make sense of other people and who we might be compatible with. We can look to the stars for the optimal timing for life changes

What makes stories about interracial relationships so intriguing? Well, maybe it might be the fact that, not that long ago, marriage between people of two different races was illegal in America. Even today, they’re still not that common: 10% of all marriages in the US are interracial, and 7% for the UK, where I live.

In thrillers of the past, if queer characters were mentioned at all, they were usually delegated to victims or villains. But in the last few years, mainstream publishers have finally let LGBTQIA+ authors have a voice in the thriller genre, with queer main characters in uniquely queer, bone-chilling situations. In my own thriller, So Happy

Love Is Not a Permanent Structure The following story was chosen by Min Jin Lee as the winner of the 2022 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. The prize is awarded annually by Selected Shorts and a guest author judge. The story will be performed live by an actor as a part of the 21-22

Lydia Conklin’s Rainbow Rainbow feels faithful to its namesake. At times the debut story collection pushes its characters through the dreary and damp, the constant pressure of light emotional rain. And just as often, sunshine arrives to reflect off of the puddles, sprinkling the pages with sunshine and delight, illuminating the unique plights of queerness

We know, we know: you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover. And yet, for as widely as the adage as used, we are all—whether consciously or subconsciously—judging books by their covers every time we browse a bookstore, or quickly scroll through a most anticipated list, stopping at the ones that catch our

Acclaimed writer Dan Chaon has a new novel, Sleepwalk, published last week by Henry Holt and Co. A few years ago, Chaon stopped commuting to teach—from his home on a tree lined street in Cleveland Heights, one of the city’s eastern ring suburbs to Oberlin College, a storied institution in Northern Ohio carrying an uneasy

In February 2021, in the deep winter of quarantine, I wrote to a colleague I was friendly with to ask a work question and to see how her novel was going. She said it had been going well, but in order to get through quarantine she’d abandoned it in the service of watching K-dramas, and

When another body washes ashore, Samuel—the sole resident and lighthouse keeper of an unnamed island—already knows the solemn duty that is required of him: pulling the body clear, before he can bury it beneath a mound of stones. It falls to Samuel every-so-often to receive the drowned refugees that wash up, shattering his already fraught

Dumped at Brunch and Too Jaded to Care Imogen Binnie Share article 1.  She’s choking me. She’s really in there, fingers on cartilage, mashing my trachea and I can’t breathe, Maria thinks. She truly can’t breathe, but she can’t bring herself to care. There was a time in her life when this was new, when she was at least

Two people cross paths and their lives are changed forever. It is the oldest and perhaps most universal story. If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English begins when Noor, an Egyptian American returning to Egypt in search of meaning and culture, meets an unnamed Egyptian man whose hopes and dreams have been all but decimated by

How many things can you use a bullet journal for?   Paid work. Creative projects. Household tasks. Grocery shopping. Exercise goals. Meditation routines. Expenses. Glasses of water. The list is endless, with the journal (or journals, for the truly committed) serving as a washi-taped repository of large and small tasks. An archive of a life well spent—or,

Annnddddd we’re back with another round of guessing the book titles using only emojis. Show off your booksmarts with our quiz, compiled by editors Jo Lou, Kelly Luce, Alex Juarez, and intern extraordinaire Lauren Hutton. Stumped? The answers are at the bottom! Can’t get enough? Click here for the first round of guessing the book