Literature

Writing my first poetry book As She Appears was a journey for me as a 41-year old debut poet—I was waiting to find poets like me, who were queer and Asian American. It was a careful writing over a decade, as I considered all of the ways that women—Asian American women, Chinese American women, queer

I had a friend—we’ll call her Kinsley—who was as close to me as a sister for nearly 20 years. As we grew older, our values began to differ, but we both agreed that no difference was profound enough to break our friendship. Kinsley married a man she met on a religious website, sending me a

Where’s Waldo of Eternal Damnation The Butt Song from Hell One section of Hieronymus Bosch’s massive triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, depicts a hellish chorus singing a song painted on the buttocks of a sinner. -io9 i. Of course Jesus is there in the garden already looking into the distance at what comes next

“I Took My First Date to the Black Lives Matter Protest”—Refinery 29 “I Spent 35 Years Trying To Convince the World (And Myself) That I’m White”—Huffington Post  “I’m Moving My Family to Canada to Save My Black Son from America”—Cosmopolitan These are all real essay titles, and they’re also the types of writing it’s easiest

As a Mexican American, I’ve learned to expect hauntings. That shouldn’t surprise most. The iconography of the Day of the Dead has become well disseminated in American popular culture, from Coco to Halloween face paint to calaveras on sale at Target. For the uninitiated: over two days at the beginning of November, those who celebrate

Omani author Jokha Alharthi’s new novel Bitter Orange Tree, translated by Marilyn Booth, is beautifully sad. The book is narrated by Zuhour, a young Omani woman attending university in the cold of England, who is grappling with an unspeakable, internal ache. Her pain could go by many names: depression, nostalgia, homesickness, loneliness, or regret—but it

When I started reading Chole Caldwell’s new book, The Red Zone, a memoir about identity, love, health, and pain, all told through the lens of her relationship to her period, I didn’t think I had period hang-ups of my own to work through. I do have pudendal neuralgia, a nerve pain condition that I’ll get into

The word “psychedelic” is rooted in Ancient Greek, and means something like “mind-revealing” or “mind-manifesting.” To me it means pushing boundaries, revealing new corridors of the mind. When I was in my twenties, I read all the Anglophone fiction about the border by Mexican American/Chicanx/Latinx writers I could get my hands on. What I found the

The First Flight Out of the Cult of Celebrity Maggie Shipstead Share article You Have a Friend in 10A  I’m told I went catrastic for the first time in 1984, when Jerome Shin (yes, the director) took me up to my bathroom—my gaudy childhood bathroom with the big pink Jacuzzi and mirrors on all four walls—and cut me

A sexual coming of age story, Little Rabbit is about a 30-year-old queer writer who meets a choreographer in his early 50s at a residency and quickly feels a spark of desire. The relationship that follows pulls her out of her comfortable life of hanging out with her best friends, working as an administrative coordinator

On a particular afternoon, I drove my minivan through the rainy streets with the radio on, my 15-year-old daughter sitting at anxious attention next to me. We were at the tail end of a particularly dreadful Supreme Court nomination hearing, and I, like many women in America, felt a crushing sense of ominousness and doom.

I’m barely on Twitter, but I can appreciate an excellent tweet. There are some standard characteristics of the best—they are terse and clever, and, even better, they are well-worded and cutting. It’s no wonder that one of my favorite tweets, a triumphant quip, was drafted by a dictionary account: It’s the tweet from Dictionary.com referencing

People Love a Story Where Someone Almost Dies Party Stories I saved someone’s life once. A woman drowning in a river, and good thing because it’s my go-to party story. People love a story where someone almost dies. Really, that’s the part they love–not that a hero stepped in to save the day. People are

My Gender Won’t Fit in the Family Car KB’s Origin Story I was born a weary son painted into a family unit. I can’t fit in, but I do fit jeans if I squeeze into them enough. I pain myself with laughter when someone asks whose baby is this. I sleep in a tunnel of

Editor’s note: We don’t typically commission custom cocktails for book releases, but when our own managing editor is named one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 for her sensational debut, Little Rabbit, a toast is in order. So we invited mixologist and author of The Gold Persimmon, Lindsay Merbaum, to develop this custom

Many of us know Michelle Hart from her wonderful work highlighting queer writers when she was the assistant books editor at O, the Oprah Magazine. Now, she has her own novel to add to the fold: We Do What We Do In The Dark, an exquisitely written, intimately affecting novel about Mallory, a college freshman,

To weather the early days of the pandemic, I went back to my parents’ house in Southern California. I had lost both of my jobs and, after applying for unemployment, had nothing to do but wander through the neighborhood. In those days we didn’t know about the improbability of outdoor transmission, and many of my

It’s difficult to process the recent news of a leaked draft decision from SCOTUS; what’s even more difficult is that the draft decision, should it become a ruling, will overturn Roe v. Wade, rolling back decades of work fought on behalf of human rights. I say human rights, as opposed to women’s rights, because abortion