Literature

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Pain fractures.  It fractures bodies into camps of health and malfunction. It fractures time into I probably can and I simply cannot. It fractures trust in the medical system. It fractures relationships, careers, bank accounts, hope.  In writing The Body Alone, form and content needed to reflect what I have experienced as the cyclical quest

Comics are unfettered by the respectable rules of the realist narrative. Dreams can bleed into waking life, metaphors can become literal, and contradictory sensory impressions can be juxtaposed without connective exposition. This is also how traumatic memories often present themselves. Graphic storytelling are an especially effective medium for depicting how abuse feels—how it alters your

Digging Out Bells: A Summer by Afton Montgomery A day of summer My right foot is a right foot in the garden in a black Croc no socks in a great deal of pain.  A day of summer Neuropathy, the confusion of nerves, comes in a slew of colors. Indigo. Lemon. A cold lavender and

The more I learn about memory, the less I trust my own. Neuroscientists tell us that the process of remembering does not mean that we are retrieving fixed images or scenes from a sealed vault in the brain, but rather that we are firing synapses along specific pathways, leading us back to a moment from

I’ve Been Diagnosed With Blackness Descent I might have seen you for help from my affliction with Blackness. I don’t know. Kendrick says he has been diagnosed with real nigga conditions. I needed you to make mine go away. I wanted you to will the earth to swallow the cop at my door. My relationship

What makes a beguiling bad guy? Or, heaven forbid, an enchantingly conniving woman? In recent fiction, who are the villains we love to hate or hate to love? What characteristics are we attracted to? Complexity? Seductiveness? Brilliance? Sheer cruelty? Who can stand up to the Shakespearean Iago or Dickens’s Uriah Heep?  What I’ve found in

Since its birth, Frankenstein has never lost its allure in adaptive possibilities. The novel was first adapted to the stage by Richard Brinsley Peake in 1823, just five years after the first edition of the novel was published in 1818. It’s widely known that Shelley herself attended a performance and was bemused by how he

Between 1976 and 1983, tens of thousands of people “disappeared” in Argentina. Their absences were designed to create a state of terror that few were strong enough to defy. But who were “the disappeared” and what did they endure?  The majority of the “disappeared” were in their twenties and early thirties, captured and often subject

The Dumbest Animal at the Circus Is Me Alastair Wong Share article Dumb Animals by Alastair Wong The day the circus came to town, I was on duty mopping up blood so warm that steam wafted through the vast and windowless space. It puddled by the drains like spilt cranberry juice, but there was no

I grew up loving books because of my grandmother, who curated a library just for me. The narrow hallways of her house were crowded with bookshelves filled with Caldecotts, Newberys, and Coretta Scott King’s, collections of works by Alcott, Twain, and Poe, Penguin classics, and Nelson Doubleday’s Junior Deluxe Editions, which sparked my forever love

If Don’t Call Us Dead and Homie weren’t enough proof, Danez Smith’s Bluff confirms their importance in the poetic firmament through a magnificent array of form and content. Smith’s singular voice dazzles, with subject matter that is both immediate and timeless. The poems are often a linguistic simitar about the world’s many injustices—whether it’s the

In all of Martha Baillie’s books you can feel her sister. Her words offer a portal to the multiplistic experiences of existence—to understand better how cut off we can be from each other and where true connection flickers too. This year, Baillie’s memoir There is No Blue was published by Granta Books. As well, a

As a writer of both prose and poetry, I love to read work that falls between genres. Whether it’s fiction that leans into lyricism so unabashedly it should be called a poem, or a poem so loaded with narrative that it is, in effect, a lyrical essay, I celebrate the merging of poetry and plot

Riveting and unpredictable, the 2024 presidential campaign trail reads like a novel. You literally can’t make this shit up—but if someone could, it might be Charles Dickens. Here’s a six-week slice of election summer as written by 10 writers of classic fiction. The Candidate by Cormac McCarthy McCarthy’s novel moves slowly, like Biden. The gray

Wolfgang Mozart was remarkable. But then, so was his sister Nannerl. We’ve heard a lot about George Orwell, less about his fascinating wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy. How familiar are you with Dame Alice Kyteler, the first woman in Ireland to be condemned as a witch? Or Marie de France, a 12th century poet? Or Artemisia Gentileschi,

“A Matter of Voice” by Christine K. Flynn Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard. —Anne Sexton The first time I heard a voice speak words unspoken in my soul, I was 45 years old and at an American Adoption Congress conference with a new friend who had also been given

The world is burning, and the smoke is all the proof we need. Over 18,000 Palestinians have been killed, “collateral damage” in the ongoing war, and over 1.5 million Gazans have been displaced from their homes. In Sudan, the civil war has resulted in a mass ethnic cleansing. Since April of 2023, more than 18,800