“Our friendship was a lifelong game of ‘Who Am I?’ It was frustrating, exasperating, and sometimes downright silly, but it was a good, rewarding game.”
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What It's Like to Grow Up Hapa
“The question of nationality perplexes my little brain. Why are we what we are? I and my brothers and sisters. Why did God make us to be hooted and stared at? Papa is English, mamma is Chinese. Why couldn’t we have been either one thing or the other? Why is my mother’s race despised? I […]
Vincent’s Final Days
A look at the last days of Vincent van Gogh. The painter was visiting his brother and sister-in-law in Paris weeks before he died of a self-inflicted gun wound: “Vincent was thirty-seven now, an old thirty-seven. After his attacks during the last eighteen months, he had given up on many cherished dreams. In particular, he […]
Same-sex Couples in the South Left Out of Trend
Buoyed by marriage equality victories on the coasts, same-sex couples are fighting for equality rights in the South: “Not only are gay couples in Mississippi not allowed to marry, they cannot legally adopt — even though a quarter of same-sex couples here are raising children together, the highest percentage of any state, according to the […]
How I Met My Wife
Novelist Robert Boswell tells the story of how he met his wife, the author Antonya Nelson, and uses the story to explore how fiction is crafted: “Why are we drawn to stories about people falling in love? There are likely a host of reasons, but here’s a good one: marriage, when observed from a place […]
Promises of an Unwed Father
His pregnant girlfriend’s father had abandoned her and her mother when she was young, and the writer is determined to prove to them that he’ll be a different kind of man and father: “When Kenyatta was 2, her father walked out on his family. He never returned, but his ghost walks with Kenyatta and Camille, […]
Chris Kluwe Takes a Stand
[GLAAD’s 2013 “Outstanding Newspaper Article” Winner] How Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe became “football’s most aggressive straight ally to the gay rights movement”: “Kluwe says he doesn’t see the issue of gay marriage as political. His philosophy on the subject goes back to the Golden Rule, and he believes an amendment that would constitutionally criminalize […]
A Brief History of Class and Waste in India
“This is the man who transformed teenage rebellion into a toilet revolution.”
My Tears See More Than My Eyes: My Son’s Depression and the Power of Art
Alan Shapiro | Virginia Quarterly Review| Fall 2006 | 20 minutes (4,928 words) Alan Shapiro published two books in January 2012: Broadway Baby, a novel, from Algonquin Books, and Night of the Republic, poetry, from Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt. This essay first appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review (subscribe here). Our thanks to Shapiro for allowing us to reprint […]
‘I’m One of the Others Now’: What Life Was Like for a Family in East Germany
“What had driven us apart? What was so important that it had turned us into strangers, even today?”
