Vaishnavi Patel and I met in our first year of law school—well before she’d published her New York Times-bestselling debut, Kaikeyi. By the time that book came out, we were fast friends, drawn together by our passion for civil…
A year ago, we asked each other: what is direct address, really? We knew the craft definition, of course: a technique in which a narrator overtly addresses a secondary group or figure (such as a reader or another character).…
Tom McAllister’s It All Felt Impossible is exactly what its subtitle promises: “42 Years in 42 Essays.” Of course, what makes it literary; what makes it a hypnotic, engaging, magical read; what makes it one of my favorite books…
I’m not sure I’ve ever come across any other region named as evocatively as the Driftless region of Wisconsin. Driftless: the word itself refers to the area’s lack of glacial deposits (or “drift”), as the land was passed by…
By Sean Collard • There’s a risk in learning how to write well: the danger of forgetting why you started. I worry that someday I’ll become so polished, so precise, that I’ll lose the very thing that made my…
Current Life Situation: Lucrative Work-Assignment, Stable Marriage-Union, Model Son. After daily work-duty, take Municipal Transporter to Metro-Sector T—Genome Modification Center—and receive Target Sequence Update. Then hurry home. Find Model Son (name Theo) at study-station, solving math problem concerning volume…
Nothing hangs together. There are big holes in the daughter’s memory. She cannot fathom the passage of time. Half a century ago when she was ten, sixty was an old woman. She does not think of herself that way.…
By the time Hamid learns they’ll have a guest, it’s a done deal. Kathy has this habit of inviting people over for beer on a whim, but having someone—a man, no less—stay for a whole week without consulting him?…
We haven’t seen her in weeks, our neighbor with white hair that tufts and spumes, not a trace of color in it, not even a sliver of gray. We never learned her name, but we noticed—the way you notice…
In Ashley Whitaker’s hilarious, satirical, and at times devastating debut novel, Bitter Texas Honey, we follow Joan, a recent college graduate with an Adderall problem who wants nothing more than to be a writer. Her biggest obstacle? She’s plagued…
