Each year National Mental Health awareness month comes and goes, but for those living with mental health conditions, navigating daily life continues. At age 33, I was diagnosed with bipolar 1. Since then I’ve sought out books about mental illness that speak about the experience of involuntary hospitalization, which allows a state to detain an individual with a mental disorder for 72 hours or longer, sometimes much longer—an experience I know well.
Read MorePortrayals of motherhood have a long history in literature, as do people turning into animals to escape the shackles of their gender roles and societal norms (Enid Shomer’s story “Laws of Nature” comes to mind, as well as most portrayals of werewolves).
Read MoreSince the mass-production of plastics began in the early 1950s, humans have produced more than 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic—the majority of which has ended up as unrecycled waste in landfills and the ocean.
Read MoreKate Durbin has made her literary mark by meticulously investigating what happens to the human condition when capitalism backs it into a corner. Her latest collection, Hoarders, is artfully material and moving.
Read MoreLibertie follows hot on the heels of Greenidge’s critically acclaimed debut We Love You, Charlie Freeman, in which the Freeman family are invited to the Toneybee Institute to participate in a research experiment involving a young chimp. Greenidge’s highly anticipated sophomore novel does not disappoint in delivering her distinctive brand of thematic intensity.
Read MoreTo risk stating the depressingly obviousness: the internet has not transformed daily life in quite the way we hoped it might. Dreams of happy social communion brought about by widespread access to the information superhighway can now be seen, in this year of our lord 2021, rotting like roadkill on the shoulder.
Read MoreOne hundred years ago, eighty-seven men died when a fire raged through the El Bordo mine in Pachuca, Mexico. Many down in the shafts initially didn’t believe there was a fire, assuming the smoke to be powder dust from a recent blast
Read MoreA charming musician with a portfolio of riot grrrl songs. Her addiction to painkillers. Federal drug charges. A posse of sketchy characters with pseudonyms like Sugar Mama, The German Gentleman, and The Millionaire.
Read MoreCrisp and laced with poignancy, Dissolve by Sherwin Bitsui is a haunting book of poetry. To haunt is to be tenacious, to hold on well past your expiration date. Dissolve calls forth characters who struggle in the oily, buzzing morass of modernity but seem unlikely to succumb.
Read MoreLeila Chatti’s debut collection of poems is mesmerizing for its narrative flow, illuminating language, stark imagery and altogether powerful voice.
Read MoreDeath in Her Hands, the third novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, begins when Vesta Gul, a seventy-two-year-old recent widow, moves to a rural town and finds a note during her usual walk in the woods.
Read MoreA recurring nightmare haunts the father in Carlos Manuel Álvarez’s novel The Fallen. In it, he is driving into the future.
Read MoreIn The Lateness of the World, Carolyn Forché’s much-anticipated new poetry collection—her first in a decade and a half—offers a subtle, seamless, and altogether stunning interplay between the poetic, the personal, and the politic. Forché’s “poetry of witness” lights the reader’s path through brilliant complexities of meaning, often in lean phrases that astonish with their power and demand repeated close readings via multiple lenses.
Read MoreIn Nicole Flattery’s short story, “Track,” the narrator describes her hometown as “a strange place dressed up as a normal place.”
Read MoreMemory, together with history and storytelling, play major roles in Monica Sok’s debut poetry collection, A Nail the Evening Hangs On.
Read MoreABC News recently ran a story about an eighteen-year-old U.S. soldier who was about to deploy to Afghanistan—to join a war that began when he was only seven months old.
Read MoreKate Wisel’s short story collection Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, winner of the 2019 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, opens with an atmospheric piece of flash fiction that hovers like a dark and heavy raincloud signaling the downpour to come.
Read MoreA temp worker feeds reams of documents to a paper shredder. A scientist tracks moss in a forest.
Read MoreIt’s 1975. A teenage boy has unexpectedly died in the middle of a Denver winter after he falls through ice. In the wake of Sammy’s untimely death, a series of strange and painful lives bloom out of the frozen ground like wounded, four-limbed fauna.
Read MoreA new translation is always worth celebrating, but that is especially so with Bright by Duanwad Pimwana (translated by Mui Poopoksakul). According to the publisher, Bright is the first novel by a Thai woman to be translated into English.
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