Literature

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

Sasquatch at the End of the World Bigfoot Loses Heart When berries were scarce I ate the chipmunk who ate the berries. When my fur made fingers of ice down my back, I told myself stories of what it must be to wake inside the sun. When rain would not stop I waded into the

My absolute favorite stories are ones that suggest magic is not just adjacent to our lives, but that it threads its way through our lives. That magic is, in fact, just on the other side of our ordinary existence—if we know when and how to seek it. Magical stories have shaped my writing over the

Brad Listi has made a name for himself by talking to other people. On his podcast, Otherppl with Brad Listi, now in its tenth year, Listi has interviewed hundreds of writers. He’s known for asking questions not just about craft and literature but also about—well, everything. In my favorite episodes, he manages to ask inappropriate

Shelly Oria’s new collection, I Know What’s Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom, is the latest in a string of new anthologies that reclaim and challenge the conversation surrounding reproduction. The collection deals with the choice of whether or not to have children, and also explores surrogacy, trans pregnancy, a medical establishment rooted in

The first time Ma told me was my last semester of college. I was in Providence. She’d moved back to Taiwan for good when I left the suburbs for Brown. One winter night, at the movies by myself, I watched Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The hero, a whiteboy, copes with the double abandonment of

My Cartoon Turtles Say What I Feel Lydia Conklin Share article “Laramie Time” by Lydia Conklin  Maggie and I had been living in Wyoming for three months when I finally agreed we could get pregnant. We were walking on a boulevard downtown over snow that was crunchy and slushy by turns, heading home from a disappointing lunch of

Once, during a tense graduate school workshop, an older, venerable professor lambasted a student’s paper as being “too sentimental.” The student asked what the problem was with sentiment, to which the professor replied, “It’s not the sentiment. It’s the sentimentality.” These words were meant to settle the argument. Sentiment was fine; sentimentality—and the overabundance of

In Either/Or, Elif’s Batuman’s follow-up to The Idiot, Selin is now a sophomore in college, returning to Harvard after the summer she spent chasing her aloof crush, Ivan, to Hungary. Now Ivan has graduated and Selin is left searching for a connection to him, which, in his absence, she finds by analyzing their past interactions

Spring has finally sprung, and you know what that means—it’s reading in the park season! But with so many great new releases to choose from, how do you decide which one to keep in your tote for spontaneous outdoor reading when the sun peeks out? That’s where I come in. Read on to find out

There is a certain kind of horse girl who likes their horses imported, warm-blooded, and tacked by someone else. I am not that woman, and my horse people aren’t, either. When I decided to return to horseback riding as an adult on a freelance writer’s budget, I touched a pitchfork long before a saddle and

Is My Husband Having an Affair With Me? The Complex It’s a warm Sunday afternoon when I notice myself moving in. Through the window I watch me, in my favorite exercise gear, carrying bags and directing movers across the building’s central courtyard. My husband uses a trolley to shift boxes, his navy cap shielding his

The most elusive prize for poets of any kind, at any time or place, is endurance. It’s not something poets can specifically work toward or ever claim for themselves and, if achieved, it may not even be in their lifetimes. To capture that elusive quality of being a poet who endures is up to many

In the hills of Appalachia, my mother volunteered at a crisis pregnancy center where she offered desperate women diapers, ultrasounds, and prayer. These centers were associated with our church, set up to offer assistance to women tempted to seek abortions. I was born into a fundamentalist Christian family in the socially conservative state of West