The first time I see him, I want this guy on my side. And so we become friends, mainly because I listen to his stories.

When I was a freshman, I rushed a fraternity. A white one, because there was no Black Greek life on campus. Ant never let me forget it. We both knew I had other options. Like with the city-wide chapters affiliated with my PWI. I could have made the e

The first time I heard your heartbeat, you were a green grape. You’d already been a poppy seed, a lentil, a blueberry, a kidney bean. The technician pressed a monitor to my abdomen in late January and the sound of running horses filled the room. That

I recently watched a gimmicky nature documentary called Night on Earth. After dark in the Sonoran Desert, Mexican long-tongued bats behave like the birds and the bees. They carry pollen from one night-blooming cactus to the next, fertilizing them acr

"The vacuum created by the end of communism required a complete restructuring of every person’s life: where and how we got food, what we read and watched, what we admired and what we believed was true."

"I will die on this hill, the hill that says: Everything that happens online is real. Online is reality, as much as meatspace."

They had sat there with all their worthy feelings about Zariyah Zhadan’s poetry, perversely enjoying the disruption of the recital by a finger circling the rim of a wine glass.

“After the fall of man, Eden was taken away and we humans have to cover our nakedness in compliance with our punishment. “

The first time I heard “Shamate,” after moving to China in 2015, the term had already evolved into a slur, denoting the very antithesis of the English “smart,” of which it was a phonetic translation. But more than its general meaning of idiotic, gari

“while the aunties sit weaving an awful dress of effrontery / —and I wish we could be alive in several ways but this one”

After taking on gentrification in Denver, did a successful anti-gang activist become a target of law enforcement? An excerpt from journalist Julian Rubinstein's new book, The Holly.

I. I am standing in a grave, straddling a body of bones found in situ. I am not the one who found the grave; in fact, my team is the third group to have excavated and re-excavated this Grecian hill. Yet, somehow, perhaps in my macabre enthusiasm, I’v

Maybe it’s the recipe’s “lukewarm scalded milk” that spills on the bottom corner of the page. Fountain pen ink swims up to meet it, ghosting the words below. No matter. Mary made her Easter Bread and Nut Roll so many times since she wrote it down in

They kissed because they wanted to, because no one could see them, because they could barely see each other, because their mouths were better off without words.

Roland Rugero talks about living the literary life in a country of orality, writing across three languages, and upending the Eurocentrism that still decides which African voices get heard.

Every morning my toddler wants to go upstairs to our guest room, to stare up at shelves of books interspersed with a few cherished items: a piece of petrified wood I brought back from a reporting trip to Myanmar, a worn mannequin hand I purchased dee

Dancing Rasta with his locks held together in a bun at the back. Cool Joe with his afro and his comb perched in his hair even during the game. Let’s not pretend that we didn’t play soccer with combs in our hair because we wanted to be cool like Cool

“We didn’t have sex then.” Luisa paused. “I just…made it up.” She kissed her sister’s shoulder through the cloth of her nightgown. A relief invaded Amaia; the force of it embarrassed her slightly.

after the drawings of Martín Ramírez I There’s a man who sits at his desk this evening, bearing witness to the end of days. The more ink he uses, the less breath left in the world. He writes the word bees and the buzzing stops, all hives explode into

We are biologically driven to make more of ourselves, and propagate the earth, and steer our sisters from madness.

I’m seventeen when my father first pegs me as a “Bennington girl.” I’ve never heard the college mentioned, but immediately recognize the name from Franny and Zooey. Salinger’s Bennington girl looks “like she’d spent the whole train ride in the john,

The author of Speak, Okinawa talks about learning her family history, writing from guilt, and questioning her father’s values.

This whole idea, combined with the world “nuchal”—it made me hate Kay even more. I imagined her as this hunchbacked, creeping thing with a big bag of fluid on the back of her neck like a goiter.

It’s early April of 2020 and I’m in my in-laws’ garage—a week after my partner and I spontaneously downloaded hours of children’s shows for our then three-year-old, packed up the Honda, and fled pandemic Brooklyn for the relative safety (and childcar

Ten This is the beginning of my body. My mother tells me it’s time to go on a diet, and I believe her. I begin to act accordingly. Her words are borne from love, but they are powerful, they take root, they last longer than the pounds do, than my chil

The writer and poet talks about novelistic nonfiction and why he thinks of his grandparents as monuments.

But it took three months before she was ready to block Graham. She trembled as she prepared to do it, too, because she had just discovered she was pregnant.

In the spring of 1941, four German bombing attacks devastated the densely-populated city of Belfast. Government officials, who feared that a hit to the city’s zoo might lead to the accidental release of dangerous animals, ordered a number of animals

Elissa Washuta’s White Magic, her third book, a collection of exquisitely crafted lyric essays, is shaped like a visitation. Washuta is the protagonist and also something like an apparition bound by unfinished business, retracing her own pain and des