‘Sestina’ is a poem by the twentieth-century American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79), first published in the New Yorker in 1956. The poem, which uses a very specific verse form, describes a grandmother and a child as they sit in a kitchen together, with a mysterious and unspecific air of grief or sadness haunting them both. […]
Credit…Marine Buffard THE GARDEN, by Clare Beams Irene Willard is a midcentury American woman with a history of miscarriages and a husband who is eager to start a family. Still childless, now pregnant for the sixth time, Irene dutifully packs herself off to an isolated ancestral estate that has been repurposed by a husband-and-wife medical […]
Photo by nichiiro on Unsplash A performance artist, a coder, and community activist walk into one another’s lives. Rather, they meet as children at a Fourth of July barbecue for Chinese immigrant families. What unfolds in Lisa Ko’s Memory Piece is how their friendship evolves, as they wrestle with their individual ambitions and collective social […]
The following is from Nell Freudenberger’s The Limits . Freudenberger is the author of the novels Lost and Wanted, The Newlyweds, and The Dissident , and of the story collection Lucky Girls , which won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American […]
