Literature

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

When my partner of four years blindsided me with a breakup over the phone, I couldn’t help but turn to my favorite singer, the serially-burned-by-men-via-too-brief-phone calls Taylor Swift. My boyfriend was no Jake Gyllenhaal-esque male manipulator, but when Swift’s re-recording of her classic breakup album, Red (Taylor’s Version), came out three weeks later, it felt

I watched Scream for the first time when I was not quite 10 years old. I can date it so precisely because my parents and I were living in a townhouse that we rented for six months after moving from St. Louis, Missouri, to Huntsville, Alabama, where my father worked as a systems analyst for

In his newest book, What Is American Literature? (Oxford University Press, 2022), award-winning cultural commentator, translator, and editor Ilan Stavans, the publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, rereads an assortment of American literary classics through the prism of the Trump years, from

Everyone’s Sins Taste Delicious Except My Own Jane Flett Share article “The Sin Eater” by Jane Flett Everyone is silent as we stand around the corpse. Galina—the wife, the one who hired me today—is perched by the head. Her hands are folded like bird wings against her ribcage and I can hear the rub of

“Surprising … Rising from the surp. What is a surp anyways?” The narrator of How We Are Translated by Jessica Gaitán Johannesson questions. The Swedish word for “surprising,” on the other hand, translates to “överraskning”—which, when taken apart into “över” and “raska”—literally translates back to English as “to trod over something.” Word games like this

Antoine-François-Jean Claudet, [Multiple Exposures of the Moon] (1846–52), daguerreotype, 2019.47, ​​​​​Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel / Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Queer Exposures: Sexuality and Photography in Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction and Poetry (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), by Ryan F. Long, is an innovative and original text that

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 Jubi Arriola-Headley a Blacqueer poet, author of original kink (Sibling Rivalry Press), and winner of the 2021 Housatonic Book Award. Check out the 6-week generative

I have always held a keen interest toward the processes of myth formation and how beliefs about family identity are handed down through generations. My debut novel Defenestrate tells the story of a family in the midst of reckoning with superstition and inheritance, the long-held beliefs that can shape both the collective identity of a

Completely at random, the world ended.Trade in shares was lively, the weather splendid.Lovers lay in beds and some on the sand.Artists painted nature, if not the lay of the land.Professors wrinkled brows and wrote of weighty things.The season was any season: fall and also spring. The plumber changed a pipe and mended a leak.The bridegroom’s

What You Call Your Territory I Call My Home What is another word for colony? The internet tells me my country has a dependency. Without being a possession of the United States, how could we have survived? Our veins needing the high of first world blood money. Maybe being a territory is not so bad,

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I’m the type of person that plans their travels around bookstores. A new city to explore means a route through bookish haunts: a walking tour of shops dedicated to words, my maps app aglitter with saved spots waiting to be discovered. I went to Maastricht once just to see a gorgeous 13th-century church converted into

A nonbinary teenager on their way home from an eating -disorder treatment center who tries to convince a stranger she is not a vampire, an aspiring fashion designer/dry-cleaning worker who develops an obsession with a customer, a community of people with Hansen’s disease that welcome and attempt to coexist with a newly arrived group of

On Halloween morning when I was fourteen, I got up extra early and padded into my mom’s room, where she had left her wedding dress hanging for me on the closet door: Victorian-style, head-to-toe lace, with a high collar and a tidy line of buttons all the way to the small of the back. It