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This week, a new Maggie Shipstead story at Virginia Quarterly Review explores love, infidelity, and the ways life can slip from under your feet like an avalanche. Bonus: there is also a literal avalanche. The story, “Backcountry,” follows a twenty-five-year-old ski instructor named Ingrid (#1 baby name for future ski instructors) who meets a fifty-plus-year-old […]
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Vi Khi Nao on her new novel Fish in Exile, why women shouldn’t apologize (even when they’re wrong), moving between genres, and why humor is vital in a novel full of darkness and grief.
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One episode after another with every outrageous twist and turn. I smile but no laughter comes—just a gaping mouth wishing to devour more!
...moreIn a darkly humorous new story at n+1, Jen George questions the qualifications of being “adult,” gives thirty-somethings across the world nightmares, and packs in plenty of social criticism while she’s at it. The story, “Guidance/The Party,” follows a single, childless, career-less, 33-year-old woman who is visited by a mysterious Guide. The Guide has been […]
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But to become a writer I needed at least to learn about my own superstitions. I needed space in the house to sketch with words. I needed to commit heresies. And those acts had to feel pleasurable.
...moreAlexis Deacon and Vivian Schawrz’s ” groundbreaking philosophy book for toddlers,” I Am Henry Finch, just won the 2016 Little Rebels Children’s Book Award. The award recognizes children’s books that address social justice and equality for youth: Their picture book is about a young finch called Henry who branches out from the sameness of his flock in order […]
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J. Aaron Sanders discusses his debut novel, Speakers of the Dead, his writing process, and the wisdom of sharing his early drafts with his students.
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The author of the new memoir Crave: Sojourn of a Hungry Soul talks about growing up impoverished, abused, and in love with words.
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The first time I saw Adam on television, on American Idol, past and present collided, as if psychedelic clothes, gnawed by moths, are suddenly rewoven, resurrected.
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It’s a literal confrontation of his metaphorical fear, a visual take on Rilke’s words: to view Güeros is to see a “thing poem” on the screen, to witness something like “The Panther” materialize.
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In most communities, teachers are compensated so poorly and afforded so little respect that in many cases the primary compensation is martyrdom.
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A love letter to a great album, and a phase of life.
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Time has lost all meaning. We park and get out of the car. The air is briny and wet. I watch the waves dissolve into the sand.
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There was the butterfly knife. The idea of it, not the thing in reality—sleek, wicked-edged, the same kind of knife you once asked to borrow because you were walking home alone and you wanted to be the most dangerous thing out there.
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In Charles Moore’s iconic black-and-white photograph, Coretta looks on stoically, lips parted, hands clasped in front as her husband, Martin Luther King, has his right arm bent behind his back by a police officer in a tall hat.
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It feels like we created each other from scratch, scribbling in the details and watching ourselves take shape.
...moreEmily Gould may be the queen of oversharing—but you’re the one reading this review of her book.
...moreI was nineteen. Prison seemed sexy and foreign—as did most forbidden things. Maybe I wanted to seem tough. Maybe I needed something to differentiate me from all the other over-achieving, world-traveled students at the university I attended. Maybe I felt I had something to give.
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