Los Angeles Weekly Times

Aisha Abdel Gawad’s debut, Between Two Moons, is a striking novel about being an immigrant and Muslim in post-9/11 America, about battling the blasé of youth with the burdens of womanhood.  It’s June. Muslims in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn are ready to welcome with fervor the holy month of Ramadan. Twins, Amira and Lina, are only

There’s something inherently magical about reading in the summer. Perhaps it dates back to those formative elementary school days of furiously cataloging summer reads for the chance at winning a free personal pizza, but the words “summer” and “reading” bring only positive associations to mind. With only a few weeks of summer left, indie booksellers

Searching for truth, whether at personal level or on a larger scale, has been the subject of many different narratives. I started writing my novel South in 2018 when I was thinking about truth, its relationship to history, and the possibility of accessing reality amid the excess of misinformation and the erasure of historical facts. 

Teaching My Son to Swim While I Drown Megan Kamalei Kakimoto Share article Madwomen by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto My son, Toby, demands many stories, but it’s the story of the Madwoman he likes best. Because he is part Hawaiian and often forgets, I have made her the Madwoman in the Sea—some foolish attempt to right

Jenn Shapland has thin skin, literally. Thin Skin uses her medical diagnosis as a prism to examine the thinning of boundaries between our bodies and the world: “to be thin-skinned is to feel keenly, to perceive things that might go unseen, unnoticed, that others might prefer not to notice.” Mesmerizing and carefully, dutifully written, these

For me, the term “mad scientist” brings to mind images of bubbling beakers filled with neon liquids; elongated, menacing silhouettes; and of course (Pinky and) the Brain. There is a long history of stories from Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau all the way to Rick and Morty where brilliance tips over into madness

It was the kind of summer night we’d been craving all week. Easy conversation, endless beers, suburban life drifting on welcome breezes— “Marco?” “Polo!” screamed from a backyard pool, raucous laughter as someone’s bullshit was called out. Six of us sat in a hot tub: my boyfriend, his sister and brother-in-law, and their middle-aged neighbors.

Tax Incentives for the Brokenhearted Account Because I was the one to end it, and so soon, I offered to reimburse her what I owed. She had covered most of the wedding, the move, our rent. I was living on the grace of a friend, sleeping in his sunroom on Folsom. Every morning I opened

Why is it that, in an era of convenience and online shopping, we still go out of our way to buy our croissants and cupcakes at the mom-and-pop bakery rather than the chain supermarkets? While the custom of buying bread from the baker, meat from the butcher, and cheese from the cheesemonger is an ingrained

In 2005, during the dawn of reality television and before social media transformed these experiments into income-generators for future influencers, I was a participant on a PBS reality television show called Texas Ranch House. Like all reality television shows, this one had its own uniquely unhinged premise: 15 strangers (or relative-strangers—five participants comprised a real-life

Alexandria, 1934. The wedding of the author’s grandparents, Allegra (Freja) Berdugo and Armand (Abdu) Dayan. What of Egypt is left in the children of Egypt’s Jewish diaspora? The daughter of an immigrant reflects on what it means to be “truly Egyptian” in the context of her family’s transnational identity. When my mother is on the

There is something disconcerting about reading the unpublished poems of a great and passed poet such as Etheridge Knight. After all, these are poems the poet might have deemed unworthy or undesirable to share, and to suddenly have them available publicly is revealing. But that’s the thing about being a dead writer; you’ve had your