I recently spent a semester teaching writing at an elite liberal-arts college. At strategic points around the campus, in shades of yellow and green, banners displayed the following pair of texts. The ...

Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light (1979) was published in English in 2019, in a superb translation by the late Geraldine Harcourt. Although Harcourt had translated other Tsushima books decades ...

F lash forward to the present day, as the art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator, “content.” As recently as fifteen years ago ...

Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind. I remember it starting with my feet. I woke up one February morning in the South Bronx apartment I’d just moved into with my husband, and my feet ...

A person once said to me, “You’re a writer. You must have a lot to say.” He was making an assumption. I’ve thought about his assumption many times. Is it that simple? Do I write because I have a lot ...

I n the eighth grade I hit a kid named Kevin Flowers so hard in the face that he had to travel out of state to get a corrective rhinoplasty. He made a horrible joke. He hadn’t even been talking to me.

Worms love southwestern Ontario. The region’s dairy farms offer loamy soil, untilled and laden with manure: an annelid’s arcadia. On damp nights, when the wind dies down and the temperature is just so ...

I’m scrolling through terrible images on the internet the way James Baldwin describes browsing on a television some mornings before getting out of bed, switching from channel to channel restlessly, ...

I am sitting in a bland conference room in Midtown Manhattan with twenty-nine so-called business professionals, and one of our instructors, Sharon, has just told us to imagine a huge rectangular brass ...

For many Jamaican kids in the United Kingdom, ska was mum-and-dad music rather than some dizzying new outlaw sound, but those same parents associated its up-tempo swing with the Jamaican Independence ...

Five months after Donald Trump moved into the White House in 2017, a reporter asked Vladimir Putin about the allegations that Russia had interfered in U.S. elections. After all, Trump had proclaimed ...

From an archived version of a blog post titled “How to Murder Your Husband,” which was allegedly written in 2011 by Nancy Brophy, who was put on trial in April for shooting and killing her husband in ...