Literature

Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s debut novel When We Were Birds begins in the time before time and follows the uneasy truce between the living and the dead. Cigarettes are offered, liquor is poured, prayers are said, all in the hope that the buried stay buried. This is the story of Yejide, a young woman who becomes

Sandra Cisneros’s success as a poet, short-story writer, novelist, and essayist is tied to her determination to write about others with awareness and love. Her work is populated by powerful people—powerful in their pain, joy, and hunger for home. This fall, Cisneros’s poetry collection Woman Without Shame will be published in English by Knopf and

The magnolias are blooming where I live in Spain—big bursts of pink blossoms garlanding the streets, sprays of pastel petals on gray pavements, a twist of color among concrete. It feels like magic every time, every year: the shoots and sprouts, buds, blooms, and blossoms, that literal spring in your step as winter fades. I

The grocery store of all places was my initial indoctrination into the world of horror. As my father shuffled up and down the aisles, dutifully stacking groceries in the cart for our family, I would sneak away to the magazine section and my eye was always drawn to the shiny paperback display brimming with such

First, I disappeared. Then I became a translator.  It’s supposed to happen the other way around. Crawling in between the lines, you practice effacing yourself. You perfect your ventriloquism, distinguishing yourself through a vanishing act. You’re expected to slip unnoticed from one language to another, masking otherness, both the original text’s and yours. You train

Not Even This Jesus Look-Alike Can Heal My Heartache Marcia Walker Share article “The Treatment” by Marcia Walker On the second anniversary of Margot’s death I met Jesus. He was holed up in one of those furnished condos on Bolton Avenue that attract newly divorced dads and low-level executives staying in the city for less

With student participants Leila Bagenstos, Sophia Cunningham, Cassy Fantini, Isolde Gerosa, Jae Tak Kim, and Grace Sewell Until recently, poet Julia Nemirovskaya and translator Boris Dralyuk had little reason to believe that they wouldn’t be able to return to their birthplaces—to Moscow and Odesa, respectively. Although both have lived in the US for many years,

List of Totems in the Air A broken wine glass, a Chinese radio,trees looking on undaunted as I grow old,scraps of bitter lemons,a staircase patiently awaiting the daywhen I can no longer climb it. Here I reign. Like the earthworms,I transform words into nitrogen,and thus build my homeland out of refuse, scraps,living in air saturated

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 Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, a poet, writer, and asemic artist whose debut collection Dereliction is forthcoming from The Song Cave. Check out the 5-week online generative

Mine is the story of the woman who thought she was making a book about others; realized only as it was about to be published, that she was the broken one the book talked about. The fragmented, the dispersed, the uprooted.  When I was editing the anthology Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature

I first read Carley Moore’s Panpocalypse while in line to get a COVID test during the early days of the Omicron surge. I had expected the wait to be long, but not four hours long, and the book kept me excellent company: both riveting and poignantly, painfully apt. If the long wait felt like a

Someone’s getting arrested. Is it you? Are you white? Are you or your parents rich? Is your name Richard, or perhaps Edward? Are you or are your parents rich? Did you go to a good school? Are you upper middle class? Is your name Rick or Ed? Are you generally a decent guy who gets

A Kyrgyz Soviet tomb / Photo by Evgeni Zotov / Flickr Consider Friend, when you visit cemeteries, don’t be afraid.All the dead are Kyrgyz, and most of them you know.Over here is Kerim. You knew him well.And Karakoichu. Alym. Bekish. Sabyr. And the others . . . You’d better kneel and recite the Quran.Read to

Who doesn’t love a creepy house? When the wallpaper is peeling and the floorboards creak, it summons up everything there is to love about the Gothic genre. The atmosphere, the vibes, the feeling of being trapped in a place that is home but doesn’t quite feel welcome. Or maybe… maybe it welcomes you with a

In Sensorium by Tanaïs is, at once, a sensuous and gut-wrenching experience in expansive memoir that bleeds across genre and time. Using perfume as a framework, Tanaïs builds the work slowly, moving from the base to the heart to the head notes, recounting alienation and life on the margins as a Brown Muslim growing up

I’ve always been intensely fascinated by Antarctica: the huge white continent at the bottom of the globe which is the coldest, windiest and driest place on Earth. It inspires a sort of horror vacui, a fear of all-encompassing isolation and whiteness that might find its place in a Herman Melville novel. My debut novel, All

Yanyi shows me his SAD lamp within the first two minutes of our interview. He’s somewhere in Vermont and I’m in Brooklyn, and the sky is gray from both our windows. He tries to impart some of his manufactured sunlight to me, via Zoom, so neither of us descends further into a chasm of guilt

Years ago, I had a conversation with another writer, Allison Wyss, about the utter unfairness of being trapped in a single timeline, a single life. I had no interest in life extension, but life expansion—all the things at once, “Garden of Forking Paths” style—was becoming an obsession. And she responded that she thinks story was