The first thing you notice about Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter is Sykes’s voice. It’s a stunning blend of contradictions, cutting and vulnerable, breathy and scratchy, enigmatic and bare.
You see, I am a survivor of a chimpanzee attack—an attack by my pet chimpanzee, my darling Bentley—and yes, fine, I suppose you could say he ate my face.
My school was on fire. It was exhilarating. Fire trucks were whipping their sirens around, and my whole high school was out on the football field, chattering excitedly, whispering in…
Journalist Joe Mozingo digs deep into his ancestral history to uncover the origin behind his surname, and discovers it's one of the few African names to survive not only the Middle Passage, but the history of American slavery itself.
Amy Botula traces her stockpile of hoarded condom wrappers to Winnicott's "transitional objects" and the beloved childhood toy that helped her survive early losses.
Cataclysm Baby, a short story collection by Matt Bell, explores fatherhood under the guise of a book of baby names. The innocent abecedary form belies the book’s dark contents.
Journalist and biographer Tom Reiss sits down and explores the idea that, "however obscure his subjects might be, he [is] a writer first and foremost, obsessed with getting the details right while crafting a story that could propel even a reluctant reader across unfamiliar terrain."
We searched for a lake monster on the shores of Lake Superior. This was sometime last July. My wife Meredith, son Henry, and I had headed north from Eau Claire,…