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Essays

169 posts
The allure of elsewhere
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  • Essays

Prince Edward Island

  • Karen Babine
  • May 16, 2025
The gas station attendant looks at me and says, "My advice, get out of town." There’s no snark in his voice. He’s worried.
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  • Essays

To Adopt a Grandparent

  • Josiah Roberts
  • May 6, 2025
“In every interaction there’s someone with power and someone without. If you are the latter, your two most important virtues are patience and persistence.”
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  • Essays

Home is a Word Unspoken

  • Tamar Mekredijian
  • April 18, 2025
Our grocery store. Our bank. Our beloved local coffee shop and pizza parlor. I didn’t know where I was until I saw the magnolia tree, rigid and charred.
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  • Essays

Pigs Rooting for Truffles

  • Jenny Li
  • April 15, 2025
The state was good. Parents were not necessarily good. Sometimes, in order to serve the state, you had to turn your parents in.
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  • Essays

Contra

  • Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo
  • April 1, 2025
I want to explain how they went about injecting the deer with birth control.
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  • Essays

Deficiency

  • Moa Short
  • March 18, 2025
I’ve never had a cavity, but I brush too hard. A decade ago, a dentist told me I was scrubbing away my own flesh.
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  • Collaborative Criticism
  • Comics

On Tove Jansson’s Eccentrics and Oddballs

  • Emily Webber, Rachel Luria, and Beverly Luria
  • March 7, 2025
I saw my fears and yearnings magnified and reflected back to me in Jansson's stories.
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  • Essays

Terrence Loves You

  • Lesley Jenike
  • March 4, 2025
“What a Wonderful World” was something of a protest from the very start.
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Bloody Chamber cover
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  • Close Reads
  • Essays

A Bloody Brilliant Sentence: Erotic Linguistics in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”

  • Ana Hein
  • February 21, 2025
...I had not yet read horror written by another woman with such a rich, arresting evocation of female sexuality.
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  • Parallel Practice

Parallel Practice: How to Break a Sentence

  • Randle Browning
  • February 20, 2025
Which color might capture the word “would,” for example? And which stitch?
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  • Essays

Losers Keepers

  • Miriam Fried
  • February 18, 2025
It’s hard to go on reading when you don’t remember what happened twenty pages ago, so I haven’t read many novels recently.
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  • Essays

On Snorting Human Remains

  • Benedetto Maniscalco
  • February 11, 2025
One of my friends, Enzo, had just died, and he’d probably felt a similar way, invincible and lost.
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