Hip-hop was a different kind of music that needed a different kind of writer to cover it. This is how Michael A. Gonzales came of age in a time when Black writers began breaking the white ceiling.
Search results
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Weight of a Nickel
At Virginia Quarterly Review, Sarah Smarsh looks at the high price of the American Dream through the lens of her upbringing as a member of a working poor farm family in Kansas.
Posted inNonfiction
How to Learn Everything: The MasterClass Diaries
A professor embarks on a six-month binge of celebrity-led online courses.
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Woman Becomes a Nightingale
An illustrated essay in which Carolita Johnson reviews the ugly history of rape being weaponized — and politicized — as a means of silencing women.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Story
Waiting for Alice
Nick and Nora had Asta. Why can’t we have Alice?
Posted inUncategorized
This Month in Books: ‘The Minor Figure Yields to the Chorus’
I’m reading this book right now called “The Manuscript Found in Saragossa.” It’s a recursive story-within-a-story sort of thing, and it’s giving me nightmares.
Posted inNonfiction
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Lockets
Lockets simultaneously display and hide. But does squirreling our love and grief away in a piece of jewelry keep the memories and emotions present for us, or minimize them?
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Story
Bending the Straight Line of Queer History
Recent novels by Alan Hollinghurst, John Boyne, and Tim Murphy experiment with the idea of progress over time.
Posted inBooks, Commentary
This Month In Books: ‘How Thick Was the Cane?’ and Other Questions About Things
This month’s books newsletter is all about things. As in stuff, objects. Because, as Heike Geissler says, “It’s because of all the things that are here… that you’re here in the first place.”
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
The Year of the Jumpsuit
A political art project calls for everyone to wear nondescript coveralls.
