When you have a gun pointed at you, there’s an odd calm that washes over. Time slows and your movements become languid; all you can do is pay attention to the black eye of the barrel as it stares at you. You become oddly aware of your body: your heartbeat, where your fingers and toes are. You stand still, and in the first few seconds your brain’s too slow or maybe you’re too stupid to be afraid, not fully grasping that the holder of the weapon is just one sneeze away from their trigger finger applying the five pounds of pressure required to make sure you need a closed casket. Five pounds of p ..read more

When an insect is taken over by a parasite, its mind succumbs to its new captor. No longer in control of itself, it defaults to whatever the parasite wants. Usually this means forgoing its own instincts for this other, freeloading thing. Memory is like this too. We default to our own minds to remind us of what happened in our pasts, but sometimes (all the time?) what we remember and what others remember are vastly different. If our minds can distort our memories into unrecognizable things and still have us believe them as truth, is it apt to say they overtake us, a sort of parasitic recall de ..read more

How do you narrativize silence? Prose writers often neglect their silences, inserting them as off-beats during dialogue or as cast-off descriptors. But penning lines like “the room was silent” or “silence spread between us” hardly captures silence as a feeling, a fully loaded emotional state that communicates something indelible about a character’s internal or ideological makeup. More consequentially, silence can further signify a radical act of refusal. One novel that politicizes silence as potently as any in the English language is Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, a book that positions language as ..read more

In their debut short story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, out today, Lydia Conklin examines what it’s like to inhabit a body and/or sexuality that is inherently uncomfortable—not because of one’s certainty about their identity but because of how others reject or suppress it. Conklin’s protagonists face the complicated, fraught choice to have top surgery, they transition while in relationships, they realize their queerness. Ranging from preteen to middle age, they highlight how queerness transforms experiences that are often quotidian (or simply nonexistent) in heterosexual relationships or in a ..read more

“‘Have you ever made a scene…and then put yourself inside it?’” the narrator’s mother in Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, asks her son as she colors in a Thomas Kinkade house. She continues, “‘Have you ever watched yourself from behind, going further and deeper into that landscape, away from you?’” In response, the still young narrator thinks, “How could I tell you that what you were describing was writing? How could I say that we, after all, are so close, the shadows of our hands, on two different pages, merging?” The landscape, as well as the mother-son dynamic, th ..read more

Recently, while taking my dog on a routine visit to the vet, I saw a woman crying. She sat curled in the corner of the large waiting room, a fluffy red dog bed lying empty beside her. Her tears were restrained, not performative. Occasionally she would dab at her eyes with a crumpled Kleenex. I wondered about her situation, theorizing that it most likely involved the death of a beloved pet, though while I waited for the technician to bring my dog out to me, I felt paralyzed. Here was a woman clearly in distress and everyone around her was doing their best to stare anywhere but at her. “To cry ..read more

Growing up, I always felt weird and alone when it came to crushes. Much to my friends’ incredulity, I’d never had one—because what was the point? I saw crushes as a waste of emotional energy and therefore a waste of time. I found the whole spectacle—the code names, the combing over of exchanges, the love tokens—ridiculous. My aloofness and lack of participation didn’t prevent the hand drawn cards and sweaty handfuls of candy foisted upon me, nor did it prevent my elementary school classmate from whispering “I love you” into my ear in his most sultry voice. But love—or lust, or, more likely, i ..read more

It is true what Joan Didion said about losing a loved one: “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” Life changes; the loved one is gone, and with that person a trove of shared moments, conversations, questions, unfinished business, the possibility of a future together. Life changes irrevocably in the ordinary instant, and yet for the bereaved, moving into that altered life is at first an impossible task. The bereaved must change too, but it is not an instantaneous change, and the circumstances leading up to it are seldom ordinary. The unnamed narrator in Sigrid Nunez’s much-celebr ..read more

At Linda Radlett’s first ball, her expectations are crushed, foreshadowing the problem that will haunt her for the rest of her life. Nurtured by romantic fantasies, she finds the event “utterly different from what one had imagined.” The conversation is boring, she’s a clumsy dancer, and when a party of bright young things from a neighboring estate drops in, she is so embarrassed by her homemade dress that she begs not to be introduced to them. Linda, the protagonist of Nancy Mitford’s 1945 tragicomic (and semi-autobiographical) novel, The Pursuit of Love, spends most of her adolescence “paral ..read more

When you have a gun pointed at you, there’s an odd calm that washes over. Time slows and your movements become languid; all you can do is pay attention to the black eye of the barrel as it stares at you. You become oddly aware of your body: your heartbeat, where your fingers and toes are. You stand still, and in the first few seconds your brain’s too slow or maybe you’re too stupid to be afraid, not fully grasping that the holder of the weapon is just one sneeze away from their trigger finger applying the five pounds of pressure required to make sure you need a closed casket. Five pounds of p ..read more