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In the digital era, the art of writing has evolved beyond the traditional pen and paper. Technological advancements have introduced
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Screenshot from the TV show Yellowjackets Do you remember it? When you changed? Or, stranger still, when you were between one thing and another? I do. When my breasts started to show beneath my T-shirt—buds, they called them, but it never felt like a flowering. In the dictionary under buds , it explains: in certain limbless lizards and snakes a limb bud develops . That’s more like it. Girlhood can be brutal. Your body swells, hair sprouts haphazardly, and then you bleed from between your legs while everyone behaves as if it’s perfectly normal. Perhaps it’s the bleeding that sets the men upon you, like the wolves of fairy tales, because that follows soon after. But there’s power in this new body, too, if you know how to find it. In writing my debut novel, Amphibian , I wanted to conjure a girlhood like this, as I had felt it: hyper sensorial, rich with fledgling desires and fraught with new social rules—and, at times, frightening. My 12-year-old protagonist, Sissy, feels her body changing, except she’s not changing like the other girls. “Puberty is vicious,” her mother says, brushing her worries away. Obsessed with stories of how other women’s bodies have transformed before her, and judged by a chorus of ribald girls in her head, she and her best friend Tegan depart from the make-believe woods of childhood to find themselves somewhere new and terrifying. Fabulism offered me a vehicle for this feeling—of crossing uncharted terrain. The following list of books, while all literary fiction, also borrow from the toolbox of magic realism and horror to convey the experience of girlhood in all its delight and barbarity. Take a break from the news We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven’t read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox. Submit YOUR INBOX IS LIT Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here. Chlorine by Jade Song Ren Yu is a […]
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In the digital era, the art of writing has evolved beyond the traditional pen and paper. Technological advancements have introduced
Your story “War Dogs” takes place in an animal-care facility at an airport. When did you come up with this
