In fiction, our winner is Meghan O’Toole, for her short story “Good Food for Starving Things.” Of the story, fiction judge Kiley Reid says, “‘Good Food for Starving Things’—dark, abrupt, and a bit wild—is a deft cross-pollination concerning what it means to be a beast, and what it means to belong. With addictive and highly…
Cora holds the baby until Matt leans in and takes her back. She can smell the oily lank of his hair, the sweet of his breath. She’d suggested a hotel room—there must be something nearby, she said, but her daughter insisted she stay in the apartment with them. Families belong together, she said. Cora’s daughter…
Christiane Jacox’s first book of poetry, Bears Dancing in the Northern Air (Yale University Press, 1991), received the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1990. Her translation of Gabriela Mistral’s Poemas de las Madres was published by Eastern Washington University Press in 1996. In the years since, her translations and poems have made their slow way into journals including Poetry magazine, Sundog…
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s weather reports document a lifelong fascination, even partnership, with the weather acting as the writer’s trusted, often fickle, companion and muse. The ritual documentation of the daily weather reveals Longfellow’s creative process and his failed attempts at separating his private life from the published prose and his own public persona.
By leaving China, I demonstrated my freedom of choice and a quest for knowledge. Yet physical detachment only heightened my yearning for an emotional homecoming. In the decade since I first boarded a plane to the U.S., distance has lent me both a sharp lens and a soft gaze to examine my country of origin.
Tolstoy’s treatment of Alyosha may cross over into objectification, but what makes Alyosha a singular character is the way in which he evades being objectified, something that can only be found when Alyosha’s feelings slip through how his father and master view and treat him.
The central tragedy of Forugh Farrokhzad’s life and career was that she was seen by some not as an agent, but as an adjective—as a reactive vehicle for a literary spirit greater than herself.
Jesmyn Ward connects her Black characters to climate change, present in the shape of Hurricane Katrina, by using the sound of the storm to explore their lived experience. It is the oral tradition alive on the page.
In Saša Stanišić’s impressive and touching novel, digressions are the journey, as we too move through make-your-own-adventure lives, in which where you are from, and even where you are going, are of transient import.
Summer 1980 - Digital