Joanna C. Valente: Truth or Dare?

by Joanna C. Valente The 7 train comes to a halt in the tunnel. It’s dark. No one knows where exactly in the tunnel. No one can hear anything except it’s so hot it almost feels like the humidity is cracking our bodies open, apart—is cracking the car walls open...
Read MoreCultish Childhood

“Where are you from?” For most people, this is a casual social question. For me, it’s an exceptionally loaded one, and demands either a lie or my glossing over facts
Read MoreSancho’s Relief

Readers will remember that in chapter 20 of Part I of Don Quixote Sancho relieves himself while in close proximity to his master...
Read MoreJessica Sequeira: Some Moonlight for Whitman

Whitman, when I see you in my mind’s eye sometimes I confuse you with that other poet bard, that other guru of a nation, Tagore. But first I’d like to look a little more at your image...
Read MoreOpen Galeano

In at least one instance, a book by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano may have saved a life.
Read MoreL.E.L.’s Diadem

Under the pen name “L.E.L.,” Letitia Elizabeth Landon had been one of the most famous literary women of her brief pre-Victorian moment, her poetry a staple of the popular literary press for well over a decade.
Read MoreThe World of Montague Tibbles House

“Who will be interested in reading the life of an unfortunate black woman who seemed to be making a mess of her life?” This was the question Buchi Emecheta...
Read MoreJessica Sequeira on Fawzi Karim

Not even you know what illumination you are seeking in the pubs of London, where the women lightly mock you. “To find solace in stupefaction...
Read MoreClass Dismissed

I had never seen so many tennis courts in my life. I had never heard of rugby or lacrosse. I mispronounced genre in class because I had only ever read the word.
Read MoreG.K. Chesterton: Dreams

There can be comparatively little question that the place ordinarily occupied by dreams in literature is peculiarly unreal and unsatisfying. When the hero tells us that "last night he dreamed a dream"...
Read MoreThirty-Seven Pages by Shane Jesse Christmass

A while ago, someone on Facebook was selling books. I purchased a few titles by Alfred Jarry and Edouard Leve. This was years ago.
Read MoreThe amateur spirit in writing

As the reading crisis spreads its tangential wings to include newspapers pruning peripheral departments, some semi-pro and pro writers are forced back into an amateur spirit...
Read MoreEd Simon: Fleeting Shadows of the Dead

I’ve no photograph of my great-grandfather’s brother, Peter Simon, the Hungarian tailor who was imprisoned by Cossacks and sent to a Siberian prison-camp.
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
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