Literature

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

Lotion the Walls Or Else Kate Folk Share article “Moist House” by Kate Folk The house needed moisture. So Karl was told. He sat in a landlord’s office in a strip mall off the interstate. The landlord, Franco, was known to rent out houses that were undesirable as a result of their peculiar needs and

Photo by Yahia Lababidi There comes a time in one’s life when—to reflect, heal, and grow—one must retreat from the world. Middle age, naturally, is a stage of turning inward, and our global pandemic afforded us all an opportunity of enforced mass meditation, whether we felt that we needed it or not. With the increasingly

Who would’ve thought academia involved house break-ins and over-the-counter drug hallucinations? In Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel, Ingrid Yang is struggling to finish her doctoral dissertation on Xiao-Wen Chou, a famed Chinese American poet—or so she thinks. Disorientation takes us on a whirlwind romp that combines academic satire with a who-dunnit mystery thriller. Chou extensively

The day of the incident it had been only me and Ms. Roberts at the circulation desk. I was one month into the job and used to calling these kinds of things “incidents” by then. The yelling was coming from the Adult Fiction section, an area with four tables that made up the far-right corner of the larger

I’ve always had a thing for strangers. I’m that person who can’t mind my own business at an airport gate, who strikes up a conversation with whoever looks as famished for connection as I feel. I love the gaping sense of aperture you feel among people in transit—how safe it is to tell a cab

12 Essential Makeup Tips for the Aging Ghost 12 Essential Makeup Tips for the Aging Ghost Apply lipstick to your dead mouth to bring it back to life. Quirk one side of your mouth up in a smirk. Trace your invisible lips once more, a touch too full, a touch too vivid. A red, rotting

Epistles to the Children I am writing to the copiers,to those who whisper to each other in fear,to those who scratch their loves into the tables.To the latecomers. To the ones who gazethrough windows. For those who forgettheir notebooks. For those who fall asleep in their seats.For those who don’t know the answers.For she who

A few years ago I started writing this novel called Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World, which is a love story set in a bad dream about America, and you can, if you’d like, guess how it ends. At the time, I kept thinking about the idea of the world

In Chilean Poet, Alejandro Zambra’s main character Gonzalo goes from being an acne-stricken teenager in love with Carla and poetry to a middle-aged professor. Along the way of this intensely energetic novel, translated by Megan McDowell, we see Gonzalo reunite with Carla, who at this point has a six-year-old son, Vicente, an adorable little fellow

The novel Groundskeeping takes places in the months around the 2016 presidential election. Aspiring writer Owen Callahan moves back home to live with his Trump-supporting uncle and grandfather in rural Kentucky where he takes a job trimming trees at a local college. In exchange, he enrolls in a free writing course. Over the semester, Callahan

In 1982, Alice Sebold, an 18-year-old freshman at Syracuse University, was brutally attacked during an evening walk in Thornden Park. Though Sebold reported the crime to the police, they were unable to identify a suspect until five months later, when Sebold spotted Anthony Broadwater while walking down Marshall Street—not far from the scene of the

In the new year, during a period of great upheaval in my personal life, amid the many great upheavals in all of our lives, I told my wife that I needed to watch The X-Files again.  For my money, The X-Files is the most important show in the world. Not the best—the most important. When

The Ice Pop Lady Rules the Neighborhood Ladee Hubbard Share article “Flip Lady” by Ladee Hubbard History: Raymond Brown hears the sound of laughter. He puts down his book and looks out the window. Here they come now, children of the ancient ones, the hewers of wood, the cutters of cane barreling down the sidewalk