Literature

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

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