Literature

In the early stages of writing Castaway Mountain, I recall the narrative taking shape very slowly. My book is set in a world made of Mumbai’s garbage, one that may seem unreal, but is very much rooted in reality. I had written up to the moment when fires burned on the vast Deonar garbage mountains

For many years, better opportunities on foreign shores, political turmoil, and the Maoist insurgency in Nepal have contributed to a large-scale migration to foreign countries. Many Nepalese writers, now settled in the West, have begun writing anglophone fiction and nonfiction about Nepal and its sociocultural history. Manjushree Thapa, Rabi Thapa, Chandra Gurung, and Samrat Upadhyay

Cheering for the Car in Last Place To the woman at the NASCAR race cheering only for the winless drivers You know not to trust luck or easy money: I could tell by the way you ignored the casino owner who started the race and the Yeti-toting college boys in their boat shoes, gawking at

“Did we fall into some kind of Twilight Zone of exes?” So Sam asks Margaret in my latest thriller, The Perfect Escape, after yet another soon-to-be-ex-husband has turned up in town. The two women and their friend Diana are all newly estranged from their partners, and their girls’ weekend to Saratoga Springs was meant to be

Depictions of women living without men can be found in literature since the advent of the novel. From Sense and Sensibility to The Golden Notebook to Bridget Jones’ Diary, such women are often unconventional, either unwilling or unable to fit the mould prescribed to them by society. They’re threats, failures, outcasts, but they can also

Outside of the titular Mercy Street Clinic, a priest repeats “Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee” into a megaphone. A crowd of people, all bundled in layers against a Boston snowstorm, responds in chorus, all 36 of them united in their protest against abortion. If Jennifer Haigh’s latest novel wasn’t labeled

Before I was interested in poetry, I was interested in courage. It seemed to me a noiseless thing, an almost secret thing. It wore patched clothing and cloth slippers, it kept its wedding jewelry in folded paper boxes, and it walked to the factory, or to the school, or to the market. Only rarely did

Sleeplessness is the Insomniac’s Only Friend Kim Fu Share article “Sandman” by Kim Fu The person sitting at the end of Kelly’s bed wore a gray, hooded cloak. The hood hung over his forehead and drooped across his shoulders in an elongated oval, his unseen face recessed in the depths of the fabric. The hem covered

When Don Evans, the founding executive director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, contacted me in August 2019 to contribute a piece for the program that honored Sterling Plumpp with the Fuller Award held at the Poetry Foundation, I felt happy that this lifetime achievement award went to Sterling, one of the finest Chicago

In They Said They Wanted Revolution: A Memoir of My Parents, Iranian American author and Vice journalist Neda Toloui-Semnani reconstructed the story of her parents as young, leftist Iranian activists radicalized at Berkeley in the late ’60s and who came to see communism as the political answer to Iran’s monarchy. Her parents supported the 1979

The creative writing of the twenty-first century will be remembered for having sanctioned the passage of text from paper to digital support. But is it really true that the author’s cards have disappeared? And how do contemporary authors write today? To answer these questions, together with the students of the Master’s Program in Publishing at

The gloomy moors of Wuthering Heights are famously vulnerable to the wind—so, too, are the unfortunate families who call them “home.” It’s basically Emily Brontë’s whole deal, right? From the first pages of her only novel, we’re introduced to a home beleaguered by “pure, bracing ventilation … at all times.” And it shows! Trees slant

Malika Moustadraf is a feminist icon in contemporary Moroccan literature, celebrated for her stark interrogation of gender and sexuality in North Africa. “Thirty-Six” is one of the stories in Blood Feast, the complete collection of her published short fiction, forthcoming from Feminist Press on February 8, 2022, translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie. “Thirty-six”

What is it like to break with convention? To go against expectations? To slip out of the mainstream? In my 20s what I wanted most was to write. What I needed most was time. So I took a nightshift job summarizing crime articles. Though I relished escape from the nine-to-five drudge, the inverted perspective of

Popsicles Can’t Fix This New Heat Heat Dome We are slicing fruit and fixing cold sandwiches, swiping mayonnaise on slices of multigrain bread and tearing leafy greens into salads for supper. Of course we aren’t cooking, we’re under a heat dome. It’s nearly 100-degrees in our kitchens, even with the windows wide open and every

(Click here to purchase Swan Huntley’s Getting Clean With Stevie Green, “a quirky, feel-good novel about one woman’s messy journey from self-delusion to self-acceptance.”) Take a break from the news We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven’t read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox. YOUR INBOX IS LIT

Living with chronic illness, whether you are still searching for a diagnosis or long into your own treatment journey, can be a difficult story to chart because there are often complex beginnings and no endings. Every new symptom, doctor’s visit, new medication, and dead-end can feel like false starts and little progress as one learns