“Labyrinth” by Jan Edwards Hemming When I think of Girl #3, I think of the tiny scars I carry: the word whore; my disdain for pugs; accusations of poisoning oatmeal. I don’t do shots anymore. When people ask why, I usually say I’m too old for that, but what I mean is Because the last time I did shots, cops came. If someone rolled a montage of photos of us, I’d have stills of my head slammed into granite, the skin behind her ear broken with the butt end of an iPhone, keys screaming across a room—and, after all that, the two of us fucking for hours. There’s something romantic about the admiratio ..read more

I had a plan for the year I turned 30: I was going to leave behind the life I’d spent a decade building in New York City and trade it in for a warmer, flashier iteration in Los Angeles. That’s a well-tread trope, isn’t it? The old “NYC to LA to NYC to LA ad infinitum” was immortalized in The New Yorker circa 2016 when I was 27—around the time I’d dreamed this whole “turning 30” plan up. I told anyone who would listen that my Saturn Return was coming up and—if astrology was to be believed—that meant the alignment of the planets allegedly had a big change coming for me. I decided this big change ..read more

Journalist Sasha Vasilyuk’s debut novel Your Presence Is Mandatory is a poignant look at the reverberating effects of war through the story of a Ukrainian World War II veteran’s struggle to hide a damaging secret for the sake of his family.  Vasilyuk’s book begins with death—the first chapter featuring a family at the grave in Donetsk, Ukraine of main character Yefim Shulman, paying their last respects. Shortly afterwards, his wife finds a letter in his belongings addressed to the KGB, a confession that launches the family to reconsider the man they thought they knew. The novel then take ..read more

Oceania “I know what you must be thinking,” the mother says. “A 3400 to 5800? Impossible. But oh no, we know about you. Ariel wants the perfect score. His brother got the perfect score.” She pulls her chair off the back wall of my office to the middle of the room, close enough to watch our hands at the desk.  “You are a very expensive tutor,” she says. “We only hire the best.” She says it as if I’m hoarding a secret. “You’re right,” I say. “I am the best. I make guarantees—if Ariel learns The Whole World Book, he will achieve the perfect score.”  Her head quivers. “Yes, yes, we know ..read more

For as long as we can remember (and excuse this lofty introduction), genre has served the dual purpose of business and pleasure. When you hear sci-fi, you often think of laser guns, riotous botanical monsters, or even the slowly scrolling words that begin “A long time ago in a galaxy far far away.” But consider too the specific ways genre addresses larger questions at hand, like how The Left Hand of Darkness, The Yellow Wallpaper, or the Tensorate series tackle sex and gender. We read horror, fantasy, and more to make sense of things, to recontextualize current issues in different settings, or ..read more

It was a clear, cold night in February when my wife and I took our seats in the sold-out Beacon Theatre to await what would be the most creative one woman show we had seen since Edinburgh Fringe last summer.  Earsplitting screams peeled out into the air as the performer coolly took the stage, meeting the crowd’s crazed energy with a deliberate, powerful calm. This act of tempering was a prologue; the artist then disappeared behind a draped curtain that glowed bright white, casting her in a silhouette. She lifted her arms to create the shape of long horns, evoking antiquity, and marched sl ..read more

I left New York in 2009 for grad school, and by the time I returned—just a few years later—the city had been transformed. Walking to the subway, on the sidewalks and escalators, almost everyone carried a pet screen. Sometimes people banged into things or ran into each other, too absorbed in the digital world to navigate the real one. Commuters swooned over their devices on the train, heads drooping and backs bent, like so many nodding-off drunks. It happened to me too. My phone started to exert a strange power over me—the nagging urge to check and check again. In every awkward or in-between mo ..read more

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An excerpt from The Sky Was Ours by Joe Fassler A man stepped into the barn. It wasn’t the boy I’d seen at the tower. This person was older, though it was hard to say how old—in his fifties, at the very least. His beard was gray and full, but his unruly mess of windswept hair had stayed stubbornly reddish gold. Thick glass disks hid his eyes. He saw me and went stiff. “Oh,” he said. He looked at me strangely for a second. Then he walked into the middle of the room to lay some sheets of paper on his worktable, totally unfazed, as if he’d expected to find me there all along. I couldn’t run witho ..read more

It has been almost thirty years since the Academy of American Poets launched National Poetry Month, and the vitality of American poetry has only grown since then. These new and forthcoming 2024 poetry collections showcase the diversity and talent of the poets writing today. Their words inspire a new way of thinking and being, encouraging us to empathize with one another and appreciate the world around us. Good Monster by Diannely Antigua Antigua’s sophomore collection is a raw, innovative exploration of the body after trauma. Through lyrical free verse, “Sad Girl Sonnets,” and her invented col ..read more