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 […]
Light Me Down: The New and Collected Poems of Jean Valentine by Jean Valentine I MET JEAN on my own creative quest at 22. The summer after I graduated college, I went to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, to take her weeklong workshop. My doubts about whether I was a “real” poet […]
Should you feel like a creep reading about transgressive family affairs on the subway?Credit…Librado Romero/The New York Times “My sister. My daughter. … She’s my sister and my daughter!” If you’ve ever seen Roman Polanski’s sun-bleached neo-noir “Chinatown,” which turns 50 this year, you can’t forget it: a defiant, tear-stained Faye Dunaway wailing the sordid […]
‘Got a Letter from Jimmy’ is a short story by the American writer Shirley Jackson (1916-65). The story, which runs to just a few pages, involves just two characters: an unnamed husband and wife. The husband has received a letter from an associate simply identified as Jimmy; the wife seeks to know what the contents […]
Photo by Noorulabdeen Ahmad on Unsplash I have always found myself building extremely romantic friendships. Long hours lost to phone calls, text marathons, letters, no-reason gifts, the sharing of meals and secrets and small, tender intimacies. For whatever reason, it has always seemed apparent that my friendships—if handled with devotion and care—will outlast my romantic […]
The following is from Lily Mayer’s Short War . Mayer is a writer, translator, and critic. She is a contributing writer at the Atlantic , and her translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s story collections Little Bird and Ice for Martians . She lives in Washington, D.C. The thought of Dr. Lucas in Cuba clouded the […]
People around the world are getting ready for the total solar eclipse next Monday, April 8th. I secured a pair of glasses last month, since the last time there was a solar eclipse in New York, I had to borrow a pair of viewing glasses from some teens in the park, which was an experience […]
In literature, as in real life, complicated mothers and our relationships with them affect us whether they’re in the room or on the page with us or not. I’m interested in books where mothers are not necessarily central characters—some are dead when the story begins, for example—but whose impacts (or absence) are far-reaching. The sort […]
