The Haunted Tenants of Henry James
When Rumer Godden moved to Rye, it was because her house had burned down. Little Doucegrove, a converted farmhouse ringed by a vast expanse of woodland, caught fire when a pan of oil was left on the...
View ArticleOn Silence
In the early 2000s, being able to leave Russia for anywhere in the West was considered a significant measure of success for someone like me, a twenty-something graduate of the department of letters of...
View ArticleReading Know My Name and Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl
Ten years ago, I pulled my best friend into a bathroom to tell her that something had happened to me. It was the day after. I was distraught, and my mouth fumbled for words, one I didn’t want to say....
View ArticleRevisiting James Wright’s Shall We Gather at the River at Fifty-One
2018 marked the fiftieth anniversary of one of American poetry’s most beguiling books: James Wright’s Shall We Gather at the River. Published by Wesleyan University Press in 1968, Shall We Gather at...
View ArticleThe Trials of Migraineurs
It was my first spring in Virginia. I had returned to campus after winter break and was met with green lawns and trees that sparkled with blooms, a lushness California live oaks hadn’t prepared me...
View ArticleThe Maternal Gothic and Maternal Ambition
In an early scene of Julia Fine’s The Upstairs House, the protagonist, Megan, lies in a hospital bed struggling to breastfeed her newborn. She notes the chasm between her experiences and her...
View ArticleThe Poetry of Wislawa Szymborska and Alejandro Zambra’s Book Reviews
I One of my favorite poems by Wislawa Szymborska starts like this: For me the tragedy’s most important act is the sixth: the raising of the dead from the stage’s battlegrounds the straightening of...
View ArticleTrans Panic and the Trans Literary Imagination
I had a short story titled “Rush Hour” that I workshopped at Tin House but had been ultimately stuck on since writing its first draft in 2019. The story is about a trans woman named Hila who wakes up...
View ArticleThe Terror of Racial Intimacies
1. What does it mean to examine the possibilities of deep friendship—love, even—through the lens of a queer interracial reckoning with our silences? To opt for a kind of witness that exposes the...
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