Literature

Midway through the pilot episode of HBO’s genre-hopping, endlessly inventive dark comedy, Search Party—which just debuted its fifth and final season in January—millennial NYU graduate Dory Sief (Alia Shawkat) is turned down for a job. “I read all four pages of your personal statement,” the interviewer tells her. “And it seems to paint a picture

Disaster is everywhere. In our movies, our television shows, our books, and, of course, on our news channels. Given the many crises plaguing our modern age—from climate change to a deadly airborne virus, the erosion of democracy to NFTs—it is no wonder that dystopic storytelling rules the day. Apocalypse is now.   There is another reason,

Face ID Doesn’t Recognize Me When I Cry Something, Not a Love Poem At midnight I eat your expired for him vitamins. Email with its body as the subject line. The cut on my thumb from a knife. Or was it paper? My mom sends me floss in the mail. The laugh we stained the

Destiny O. Birdsong’s Nobody’s Magic is, despite its title, completely imbued with the stuff. It is a book that transfixes and mesmerizes, so much that you find yourself staying up until the wee hours of the morning so enthralled you can’t put it down.  Birdsong gives us what she likes to call “messy” characters in

With so many amazing Wordle spin-offs out there, it can be difficult to keep track of them all! Here’s a helpful guide to some of the very best and most popular iterations. Girdle just came out last week, but it’s already all the rage! Who knew there were so many different types of female undergarment?

​​Black horror has come of age. It began as oral tales Black folks would tell each other to pass down cultural warnings and taboos during enslavement and post-Emancipation. In its pubescence, the genre unfurled and infiltrated the written word, as seen in Charles W. Chessnutt’s The Conjure Woman in 1899; and invaded Hollywood only a

When I first read “Girl”—Jamaica Kincaid’s well-anthologized short story featuring a mother instructing her young daughter how to behave and carry herself—I heard my own mother’s voice saying, “If you can’t cook, your husband will send you back, you know.” My mother said it from time to time, exhorting the young girls in her care—her

The Day She Ditched Them at the Beach Brendan Mathews Brendan Mathews is the author of the novel The World of Tomorrow and the short story collection This Is Not a Love Song. Share article Maniacs The cousins are supposed to spend the day at the lake. Summer vacation, 1980, and the radio is saying

Photo by Pierre Châtel-Innocenti / Unsplash In Winter Lights, rising star Irati Elorrieta’s first novel, Añes is a Basque woman who has immigrated to Berlin by way of Paris. Her story explores the contradictions of pulling up roots and embarking on a new life: melancholy and freedom, detachment and memory, alienation and independence. The following

Remember when Trump got elected and people started buying all the copies of 1984? It was like that, apparently, for Emily St. John Mandel in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and her 2014 post-apocalypse novel Station Eleven started once again flying off the shelves. The book is about a flu-like virus that kills almost

When I was approached to write this article, Ukraine’s battles for sovereignty were in the eastern parts of the country against Russian-backed separatists, where they have been since February 2014. In a few short days since, the Russian troops that had amassed around the border of Ukraine for months invaded the democratic country and initiated

A new book by a Nobel laureate and Booker award-winning author always brings with it a sense of trepidation. Will the new novel live up to the already established high expectations? Klara and the Sun (Knopf, 2021) is particularly tricky because it revisits questions about life in posthuman futures, explored partly in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never

Stuck on a Train with Our Family Secrets Lost The train is lost. Halted in the middle of a grassland, it seems no one knows where we are. Ma says the clouds have shot the sun so it’s hard to tell the time of the day or the direction. I gaze at the string of

There are two kinds of detective stories.  In one, the detective is a constant. They march through the mystery at hand, gathering information, forming hypotheses, arriving at conclusions. These detectives are cleanly drawn, with distinctive habits and mannerisms and turns of phrases and sartorial choices, with lines that do not change. They serve the purpose

“Literature was a vast minefield occupied by enemies,” Roberto Bolaño, who enjoyed accruing enemies in the pantheon of Latin American letters, writes in the short story “Meeting with Enrique Lihn” (New Yorker, December 22, 2008): except for a few classic authors (just a few), and every day I had to walk through that minefield, where

Picture a romance novel. Are there heaving bosoms and swaggering poses? Is the word “trashy” one of the first to pop into your mind? If so, your stereotypes are decades out of date. Recent years have seen a marked shift away from shirtless ab shots and “clinch covers” that feature a passionate embrace toward bright, flirty

How do you start writing when you’re incarcerated in prison? How do you establish a literary life without access to craft workshops, the internet, or even to the outside world? The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison, PEN America’s new writing handbook, addresses those questions to serve as “a road map