My father and his younger brother tried to make me a man by forcing me to learn how to fish. Towards the end of my fourteenth winter, as soon as the lake thawed, my father wanted his father to begin training me.

The artist and architect talks about creating large-scale, ever-changing sculptures in public spaces.

Haitian photographer Dieu-Nalio Chery grew up knowing little of Vodou. The son of a pastor, Chery wanted to explore the national religion of the Haitian people to better understand the figures and rites that had historically been syncretized with Cat

I don’t believe that I will ever like Michelle, even though I love who she is when she is my brother. I want to accept the arrangement, but I am still having trouble processing the fact that the person I rely on is not him.

When your great-grandparents grew up in Stalin’s terror-famine, your grandparents in the Holocaust, and your parents in a straddle between totalitarianism and democracy, you grew up confused about pain. Were you entitled to it? Was it real?

Two old acquaintances walk by an artificial river, recuperating all that they've lost in their conversation.

“Once my father became someone transformed and once I was a part of transforming him, into ash, into pollution, into bagged teeth sent away, the world of what was out of sight would not stay gone,” Kathryn Savage writes in Groundglass, a book-length

The Beatles were the first to bring Norwegian trees to my attention, though the profound cultural insight I was hoping to glean while listening to “Norwegian Wood” on my one-way flight to Oslo was not to be. The title appears in the same sentence wit

I speak to my leg hair as I would speak to myself. Which is to say: with suspicion. Which is to say: with one ear trained to the sounds of a door opening and closing.

All my life I’ve shown up late.              But when I do, I compensate for my delay — I laugh and preen and carry on              as if I had been present all along. I stayed in utero, for instance, two              weeks after I was due, then came

We come from just one of the seeds that were grafted and scattered, trying to connect to roots that have been shattered.

Since Ben’s death, I’ve been unraveling, the civilized parts of me spinning off to reveal the feral animal panting underneath.

I spend my days and nights invading strangers’ bodies. I put my finger in their mouths and gag them, feeling for firmness suggesting tumors; I snake a thin camera through their nostrils and into their throats to see the organ that gives these strange

How can I account for something as complicated as my mother’s life? There are too many questions.

The Foghorn Echoes is, fundamentally, an epic: the story of two men, two cities, and between them, love and a war. Set in Damascus and Vancouver, it is the second novel from Danny Ramadan, himself a Syrian Canadian and an LGBTQIA+ refugee, and it is

There is still so much gesture in Los Angeles, so much movement, so much of the divine that you could have written a hundred more books about the grotesque and the holy here.

Under her bed in her tiny bedroom: a box of secrets not worth keeping, but not worth revealing either.

“A Souvenir of Me” is a tense read, short and fraught with uncertainty. A woman suddenly leaves her marriage; a searing headache becomes an aneurysm. In a sequence of eight compact scenes, Kemi Falodun measures just how much strain a story can hold b

We made what sense we could of it all. Fire, archiving, metamorphosis — all a part of love, in the end.

In “Koru,” a mother reflects on her son’s decision to leave home and return to kura — Māori school — after a gap of two and a half years. The narrative shifts between past and present, mother and son, circling the orbit of their shared life. At the h

One question of childhood: why do some people have gold teeth? I could spot them from a distance. A sun shines. In each of their mouths a different sun. But I never said: the woman with the gold tooth came, the man with the gold tooth went. Though I

After they find dry ground for refuge, tie up surviving livestock, scan the ground for snakes and scorpions, queue, break queue and grab for food, plead for water, scream for tents, weep for loss, curse officials, lament fate — after all that, people

I have folders of material that I didn’t use in We Take Our Cities With Us: A Memoir. At various points, I wrote about images that I’d excavated during the research into my mother’s life, a process that (I realize now) I adopted from researching my n

And maybe that was the point of it — to make the act of writing a temporary spark in a constellation of other temporary sparks...

Every week or so, a patient comes into my clinic with back or shoulder pain. These patients’ MRIs are spotless, and they have been told by many doctors before me that everything looks normal — that there is no measurable source of their pain. It is m

In “Cockroach,” two brothers navigate the small world of their apartment in the absence of their mother. Late one night, the younger boy spots a cockroach scuttling across the kitchen floor. Terrified but determined to act bravely, the boy takes it u

The novelist discusses airport lounges, post-revision regret, and what it means to save someone’s life.

I had, with threatening effort, lost fifty pounds the previous summer, but I still found my body pouchy and wrong, a pillowcase loaded with beans.

Caught between pandemic and bureaucracy, Algerian migrants try to find meaning in statelessness.

Alexander Chee is living the answer to an American question that is as elusive as it is enduring: how do we integrate political consciousness into who we are? Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and Queen of the Night, as well as t