Literature

Aviva Rosner wants a baby. She tries for two years, to no avail. She dreads the start of her monthly cycle. She gets her husband’s fertility tested. She cuts alcohol and sugar out of her diet. In her career as a singer-songwriter, she puts out an album called Womb Service which, in part, is about

Before the vampire, I loved wearing clothes. I saw my wardrobe as a textile collection of myself in all my various fits and moods, and each day, my task was to find the best combination of clothing to wear that would project to the world my current state. I loved getting up each morning and

Morgan Talty’s The Night of the Living Rez is a searching and honest collection of short stories following a young Penobscot character named David and his coming of age on the rez, where community, family, and tradition are as fraught with colonial entanglement as they are forces for healing.  With hyperreal and welcoming prose, Talty

Never Marry a Man with a Human Mother K-Ming Chang Share article Xífù I don’t mean I want her to die. I’m just saying, what kind of woman pretends to kill herself six times? I’m saying that she loves to pretend. Some women are like that. They don’t know what real means. Like that neighbor I had back

The unnamed narrator of NSFW begins her story by telling us she’s in a toxic relationship with the city of Los Angeles. She hates it; she loves it; she never wants to leave. This opening confession sets the scene for a riveting workplace drama in which the narrator attempts to climb Hollywood’s unforgiving ranks at

As a teenager, I loved to hole up in my room with my mother’s back issues of Gourmet Magazine and read through recipes I had no way of making: Florentine boar ragu! Spaghetti with ramps! Vietnamese spring rolls stuffed with bean thread noodles, wood ear mushrooms, grated carrot, and ground pork shoulder! (Ruth Reichl really

What, if any, responsibility do we have to the people who live near us? Especially the ones we don’t particularly like, those who may have insulted or ignored us, trapped us in kitchens and cocktail parties with overreaching inquiries, indulged their petty prejudices at our expense, or implicated us in their close-knit cruelties and the

This Apple Watch Is Clearly the Boss of Me Solo My Apple Watch is my conductor, tells me to stand when I need standing, reminds me to breathe when I forget, vibrates when it’s time to turn on Main Street, my hands on the wheel. I pass Osprey nests in the Audubon. My Apple Watch

Love is love… is love. But that doesn’t mean “love” means or feels the same every time you experience it. Celebrating LGBTQIA+ love means acknowledging all the different types of feelings we have, whether it’s romantic love for a partner, love for our community, love for ourselves or even love for a specific place. These

Masturbation scenes run contrary to the standard rules of writing good fiction. There’s not a whole lot happening, plot-wise. The character involved is hardly moving, their thoughts are both incoherent and numbingly predictable. Nuance is abandoned, Gods rise from a variety of machines, clichés proliferate. What a shocker: the pool boy is sweaty and needs

Since the late 1990s, Meghan O’Rourke battled symptoms no one, including O’Rourke herself, could explain: dizziness, night sweats, fatigue, electric shock sensations, stabbing pain, hives. When on a trip to Vietnam in 2012 a rash—seven or eight raised bumps arranged in a circle—appeared on her inner arm, she thought, It looks like Braille. But what

Designing a book cover is challenging, even more so when the work contains a raunchy subject matter. How do you convey, in a single glance, that the book is sensual, even sexy, without falling for pornographic tropes?  My debut novel, Little Rabbit, is about a sub/dom relationship between a 30-something queer writer and an older

Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt is a revelation: a gory, prickly horror novel unflinching in its violence but deeply humane as well. The book depicts a world ravaged by a plague that turns all people with testosterone in their bodies into feral, matted-haired monsters. But in contrast to the growing canon of cis-normative gender-apocalypse fiction, Manhunt centers

My Ex Cheated, But I Outlived Him Meng Jin Share article “Phillip is Dead” by Meng Jin Poor man. I got the news as I was coming aboveground. “Phillip is dead,” the subject line said. In the body of the email were details of the memorial.  I was shocked. Not so much because Phillip was dead

In Nishant Batsha’s novel Mother Ocean Father Nation, a family’s life shatters as the horrors of a military coup befall a fictional South Pacific island. The country is rife with tension between the native population and the Indian community, who arrived on the island as part of colonization. The outsiders and their businesses become targets

In the climax of Stranger Things 3 a giant laser punctures the wall of an underground bunker, breaching the veil between ours and the Upside Down. An alternative dimension which lies parallel to our own, the Upside Down is governed by an evil hive-mind intelligence known as the Mind Flayer. The fissure between worlds looks

I have thought a lot, over my decade-plus of drinking and working in bars, about what makes any one establishment stand out over another. Why are there places we love and return to, and others we leave with indifference, ambivalence, even disappointment? On the one hand, if there was an easy answer, opening a bar

My God Has the Head of a Vulture Ornithology After Theodore Roethke To find the owl I must follow the crow who says my ears and eyes better behave; it’s hard for me to learn what the crow knows unable to refuse the blueish glow nor the shiny trinkets my wingtips save. To find an