Fountain Girls
In this essay, listed as a Notable in Best American Essays 2017, one young women recounts growing up poor in small-town Colorado, a town plagued with problems yet named an All-America City, and after she moves on she wonders: What if the American dream is just a dream?
Garni-Geghard
When a young woman returns to Armenia to reconnect with her family’s ancestral home, she discovers that her complex cultural identity has as much to do with God and her mother as her motherland.
The Vandercook
(Fiction) When Molly and I had been married for thirteen years—splendid Molly, difficult Molly—she took over Conte’s Printing, a New Haven business my grandfather had started in the thirties. My father ran it when I was a child, and I spent much of my time in the shop. A teenage boy, Gilbert, ran errands for my father after school and also kept an eye on me. When I was in college I fooled around on the letterpress printer my grandfather had used, and Gilbert, who still worked there, teased me for caring about something old-fashioned.