Literature

Naheed Phiroze Patel’s debut novel Mirror Made of Rain follows Noomi Wadia, an indignant young woman raised in a Parsi family in India, through a world that is keen to control women and safeguard long-established pecking orders. Since her childhood, Noomi has had a difficult relationship with her mother Asha, who battles severe alcohol dependence.

The design department at the tech company I worked for was suffering from a morale problem. Management saw the writing on the wall; our big happy work family was on the verge of a smashup. One afternoon, we received an email from the director informing us that the company was excited to offer a new

From the opening sentences of Lan Samantha Chang’s novel, The Family Chao, we learn that Leo Chao, the patriarch, was not a good man. He was aggressive and domineering, and an unfettered capitalist. He carried many desires, and he satiated each of them, all while owning and operating a restaurant that capitalized on feeding the

Adopt a Cat for the Global Collapse Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi Share article “It Is What It Is” by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi  Khorshid, whose name in English translates to Sun, arrived from Canada on a dreary February morning. I had been warned that she wouldn’t answer to Sun because her family only

What does it mean to be displaced from your homeland? How are families broken and remade? When people lose everything, how do they find the will to survive? Both vast and intimate, Tsering Yangzom Lama’s riveting debut, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, begins with the Chinese invasion of Tibet in the 1950s, when

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