Literature

How To Bring a Living Being Into a Dead House Tove Ditlevsen Share article They sat across from one another on the train, and there was nothing special about either of them. They weren’t the kind of people your eyes would land on if you tired of staring at the usual scenery, which appears to

I first met Courtney Maum in 2011 when she was writing the “Celebrity Book Review” column for Electric Literature. Through the medium that is Courtney’s mind, iconic pairings such as John Mayer reviewing The Marriage Plot and Anne Hathaway reviewing The Woman Upstairs ensued. Despite their obvious farcical nature, occasionally readers and sometimes publicists mistook

Having been raised by my grandparents and great-aunt, my early years were predominantly filled with oral storytelling. Many tales my family shared bordered on the fantastical and incorporated magical elements or hinged on the unexpected. In one story, crickets were transformed into silver coins while in others people levitated or shapeshifted into human-animal hybrids. When

The first time I read a book about a person who even minorly resembled me, I was 19 and teaching at a creative writing summer camp. My coworker Sophie Lee’s YA novel What Things Mean tells the story of a young Filipina girl named Olive who uses reading to cope with feelings of loneliness and

On Monday night, fashion’s favorite night of the year (part 2) returned with stars and designers coming out to celebrate the Met Gala – The Sequel, as I like to think of it. Officially, the dress code of this year’s famed bash, hosted by Anna Wintour, was “Gilded Glamour,” white tie for the men and

Have you ever gone to the doctor with a problem that you can’t quite put a name to only to be told that it’s “in your head,” or, worse, leave with a recommendation to “try yoga”? Have you tried to confide in those near and dear to your heart only to be told probably have

I believe that all readers secretly have one particular book they’re looking for, an ideal book that will fill a primal hole in their literary experience. The book I want is a literary novel about a woman who lusts after a man and it doesn’t destroy her life. I’ve recruited some extremely well-read friends into

In 1995, I left the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle to teach English in Vietnam. Around that time, my friend and fellow bookseller Janet Brown traveled to Thailand to teach as well. There was no email then, and overseas phone calls were a luxury. So we wrote to one another, meditating on the countries

The title of La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind caught my eye instantly as I scrolled through the lesser-known corner of Instagram known as Black Bookstagram. On the white cover, I made out the silhouette of the shoulders and head of a Black figure whose head is adorned with

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 Jason Schwartzman, an essayist, and fiction writer, and author of the memoir No One You Know: Strangers and the Stories We Tell. Check out the

The Chickens Will Inherit the Earth Zoë Ballering Share article “Ark” by Zoë Ballering On the 152nd day, after a spate of double-crowing at the crack of dawn, Naamah appeared in my doorway. Although she was a normal-sized woman, I had a shoebox-sized cabin, the smallest among any of the handlers, and I had the

In the biblical Exodus story, before the enslaved Israelites escaped the Pharoah, Moses had his own personal exodus. After striking and killing a sadistic Egyptian slave driver, Moses, terrified, ran away, exiling himself to the desert. He struggled with his identity, feeling othered and alienated while away from home, so much so that he named

Sean Singer’s poetry collection, Today in the Taxi, could easily be described as as a vivid portrait of ride-sharing in New York City in the years leading up to the pandemic. At heart, however, these poems read like unaddressed letters sent to help us navigate an unsettling modern world. While driving a taxi in New

The Garden of Pain Needs a Good Hard Freeze A Snowy Day The snow fell first as childhood longing, small as a soap doll’s Ivory curls, blown from paring knife to floor. A few crescents was all there were: on eyelashes, making it impossible to see, another landing bitterly on the tongue, hushing it, dissolving

Matthieu Aikins’s olive complexion, dark hair, and ambiguous features means that he is often mistaken as a local in Afghanistan and the Middle East where he has lived since 2008. In his non-fiction book The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, the Japanese Canadian journalist goes undercover as an Afghan refugee to accompany his interpreter and