Literature

Iron-Red Tea Were your body a teapot, sleekand slender, face unseenand hands like iron-red stems,were your mouth to release a rooflesswind drawing with smokea lush hissing garden,my me would become a You in myhigh-gorged and fruit-shaped nothingness,eager-handed, wild and triangular,forged in the flame you kindled. Were your body porcelain chinaas I feel it, light, white-glazed,absence

The Asian American women writers in this reading list explore the existential. They seek to do anything but simplify. They live with and write through some very dense, tangled complexities, even mysteries. Some, perhaps many, unsolvable, with wounds that perhaps cannot be closed, not in this lifetime. These are the kinds of writers who continue

This Nice Ghost Can Make All My Decisions Disappearing Act My father gathers the corners of the silk handkerchief; his hands smell of cloying wort from brewing. The colors are shifting, and where was the blue patch and tear I mended those years ago? Every time he folds the fabric it grows larger. Soon the

Photo by simpleinsomnia / Flickr If men and women reappraise the stories of masculinity they’ve received in texts by male authors, we all might better understand the stories we have. In the first version of William Faulkner’s novella The Bear, published in 1942 in the Saturday Evening Post, a ten-year-old boy in Mississippi goes on

For those of us who want to become real writers—whatever that means—the countless resources available can feel a bit dry and uninspired, ranging from tired but true clichés to well-lauded craft books (Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir on Craft sits dustily on my shelf). Many of us find ourselves falling down late-night internet rabbit

One day a friend of mine went on an anti-Covid rant. We were out in public with a big group of people. He began shouting so everyone could hear. “The pandemic isn’t even real! The only people who have died from Covid were going to die anyway! So, they should just die.”  I was dumbfounded.

To Be Young and in Love and Stranded in the Snow Stuart Dybek Share article Cordoba by Stuart Dybek While we were kissing, the thick, leather-bound OBRAS COMPLETAS, opened to a black and white photo of Federico Garcia Lorca—in profile, a mole prominent beside a sideburn of his slicked-back hair—slid from her lap to the

When a fictional Tehran is seized by rolling tremors, the city’s inhabitants are thrown into carnivalesque disarray. As the earth slips and sways, a mother clicks her digital prayer beads between operatic screams, young people rollerblade maniacally amidst scurrying riot cops, and a cane-clad old man guards his precious African violets from the frenesi. Watching

Grandma Craves More Than Fast Food  Filet-O-Fish On Qingming day, bring a filet-o-fish to Nainai’s grave. Beat back the crows coming to steal from ghosts. No weeping. She would’ve said: You can’t wipe anyone’s ass with sad. She would’ve slapped the salt off your cheeks, sent your mole saucering through the sky. Feel cheap about

The holiday season—which I (arbitrarily!) define as beginning in mid-November and continuing through the first of the year—is a minefield. If you’re lucky, the bombs are carbohydrate- or confetti-filled. If you’re not, you’re facing roughly two months of celebratory gatherings and realizing that alcohol, while perhaps a helpful social lubricant, does not actually have the

We as society need to accept our love of Hallmark movies. No more quietly enjoying Hallmark movies when no one else is around, no more calling them “guilty pleasures” or feeling embarrassed when someone labels you a Hallmark movie enjoyer. It’s time to end the stigma of enjoying the simple pleasures, because we could all

The celebrity cookbook is a curious genre: its essential premise is that a person who is famous for something other than cooking can, on the basis of that fame, also teach us how to cook. At the same time, it’s a tried-and-true publishing gambit: Gwyneth Paltrow and Stanley Tucci are following in the footsteps of

Caught in traffic on I-95, my boyfriend asked me to put some music on. I had come back east for a friend’s wedding, and Harry and I were driving together to a small town in Connecticut for the ceremony. “Time for ‘Silk Chiffon,’ ” I said, unlocking his phone.  Harry glanced over at me, then

Everyone’s Christmas Present is Burning Resentment Cara Blue Adams Share article “Charity” by Cara Blue Adams I get home to Vermont from my first semester at Williams for winter break after a long, snowy ride on a Greyhound bus redolent of urine and the alcoholic tang of Wet Wipes to find my mother has had

Spanning dreamy teenagers to furious parents, violence to kindness, each of the ten short stories in Five Tuesdays in Winter is rendered with Lily King’s signature longing and wit. We are all learning to carry our grief, this collection argues, yet still hoping to scrape together a few more moments of passion and connection. From

Gokyo Lakes, Khumjung, Nepal / Photo by Kalle Kortelainen / Unsplash In the aftermath of COP26, it is easy to see we will most likely fail to limit global warming to 1.5℃, or even a catastrophic 2℃, yet we continue to live as though we will somehow avert the consequences. Thomas L. Friedman, writing for

Writing conferences serve many purposes. They’re places to meet other writers and build community. They’re places to help polish up existing writing or generate new work. They’re places to reset and get inspired. They’re places to meet agent, editors, and other members of the publishing literati. They’re even places to party. Still, they can feel

A few years ago, I found myself a bit tipsy at the National Book Award ceremony. It was my first—and so far, only—time there. The experience felt grand; it was a red-carpeted “benefit dinner” on Wall Street. People wore tuxedos and gowns. I couldn’t look around the room without seeing a writer I admired: Dorothy