Literature

Gwen Kirby’s collection Shit Cassandra Saw is structured around a handful of women lost to the annals of history, with a modern twist added. There are ancient warrior queens turned contract hitters, cross-dressing pirates, and lady duellists in a Seurat-like tableau.  Like its cursed prophetess namesake, Kirby’s collection is obsessed with the act of seeing

A little over a year ago, I was working as a cocktail server at a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen, putting my MFA to good use by writing what I could on my cell phone between rushes. One night, I had an idea for a story and dashed into a bathroom stall to jot down

The novel The School for Good Mothers begins with Frida Liu–a single working mother who is at her wit’s end–having a bad day that culminates in her losing her daughter to protective services. As her punishment she will be part of a new program to rehabilitate bad moms and if she is successful, then and

Leading up to the COP26 conference, in September 2021 several hundred protesters met in London’s Parliament Square before marching to the Home Office / Photo by Alisdare Hickson / Flickr “Our world is not falling apart, we’re at a turning point. An old paradigm is dying, and a new world is being born.” This hopeful

A Notebook is No Place To Keep a Secret Jean Chen Ho Share article “Kenji’s Notebook” by Jean Chen Ho Tuesday evening, Fiona rode the 6 train downtown after seeing Kenji home from the hospital. She’d tucked him into bed and made sure the packet of OxyContin lay within his reach on the nightstand, next to

It was my gut, not my mind, that first suggested to me that the films I was consuming represented less a leap for womankind than an interminable box step routine. My feminist hackles had been, for a time, smoothed by the presence of preternatural beauties with STEM degrees in even the silliest movies, like Dr.

Jean Giono at his home, Le Paraïs, in Manosque, France, 1942 / Photo by André Zucca / Courtesy Les Amis de Jean Giono Written late in life, “Le Haut Pays” and “Camargue”—once again paired in the Archipelago Books edition of Ennemonde, newly translated by Bill Johnston—offer a microcosm of French writer Jean Giono’s postwar écriture.

Today is publication day for a new translation of Tiruvalluvar’s Tirukkural, a Tamil masterwork of poetry and practical philosophy. This new translation, published by Beacon Press, is by author, poet, and performer Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma. Each chapter of the Kural consists of ten kurals on a single theme, such as friendship, hospitality, or rain. The

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 Jenessa Abrams, an essayist, fiction writer, literary translator, and practitioner of Narrative Medicine. Check out the 4-week online non-fiction workshop Abrams is teaching about decentering

Mami’s Gone, Let’s Ditch the Babysitter rosie the robot While Mami works the hotel rooms, Susana, la vecina and our babysitter, talks mad shit, says Dad doesn’t pay child support because of what a banshee Mami’s become, says Mami doesn’t know how to Mami, “Look at how she doesn’t even comb your pelitos,” “Look at

In early 2016, I started compiling a list of books I was anticipating by women writers of color because, as a reader and occasional critic, I was having trouble finding such titles. If I was coming up short, I thought, then others surely were, too, and maybe it would be useful if I published my

Though I am not a horse woman or cow person, I recently found myself writing an American Western. Pity the Beast started innocently enough—as a short story unfolding on a ranch in the northern U.S. Rockies with people in cowboy hats and boots, horses and cows. Westerns are fun to write, and I was hooked,

Growing up, once a year my anneanne (maternal grandmother) would visit my family in our suburban home in Ohio. Before returning to Istanbul, she never failed to stock our fridge with sigara börek, a puff pastry filled with cheese and rolled into the shape of a fat cigarette, as its name suggests. For months after,

Poetry has always existed as humanity’s port in the storm and the keeper of our histories, before and after we began putting language to stone and pulp. I have always been drawn to the lesser known, and even yet-to-be discovered, poets, perhaps because in my mind, poetry encompasses so much more than simply its dictionary

The Thin Line Between a Drill and an Emergency Mark Jacquemain Share article Lockdown by Mark Jacquemain to Caity P. When it happens we’re in drama class, still caring about stuff that doesn’t matter. Like Final Project. It’s nearly the end of semester, so we’re in that stretch that’s all about Final Project. Which is

Victoria Chang’s new collection, Dear Memory, expands the field of the memoir for readers to explore a full-color archive of family photos and historical documents collaged between lines of poetry and letters. It prompts us to ask, with her, What composes a life and what makes of life art? What makes of memory history, and

Written from the perspective of a choral “we,” Brown Girls captures a sense of solidarity among these women, who Daphne Palasi Andreades follows from childhood, into their adulthood as some leave their borough, and eventually the city they first called home. But Queens is always with them, and in the novel’s vignettes, Andreades explores the

Five years ago, on a brisk September morning, I was having breakfast when I smelled smoke. Suddenly, those ubiquitous New York City sirens seemed unusually loud. I checked the hallway outside my apartment; the air was hazy. Frantic, I woke my husband. We evacuated from the sixteenth floor down to the parking lot, now crammed