“I thought for sure, I’ll never write about Rilke again. I’m done with Rilke! I’m sick of Rilke! Rilke — no more. But then the other day … I just started researching something about Rilke.”
fiction
Kristen Arnett on Taxidermy, Memory, and “Mostly Dead Things”
“What’s considered high art? What’s lowbrow? What are those things? That’s something that, as a person who like, lives at 7-Eleven, I’m extremely interested in.”
‘The Home Is a Place as Wild as Any in the World.’
Chia-Chia Lin talks about the wildness of domestic spaces and writing her novel “The Unpassing” through the early months of motherhood.
The Women Characters Rarely End Up Free: Remembering Rachel Ingalls
The recently re-appreciated novelist Rachel Ingalls passed away last month. She was among a cohort of twentieth-century women writers who were ‘famous for not being famous.’
Lock Your Doors?
A new homeowner reads two novels that revolve around surreal home-invasion scenarios, and considers what it is about his house that scares him.
‘I’m Always Writing Against This Idea That Denver’s a White Space.’
Kali Fajardo-Anstine talks about her new short story collection “Sabrina & Corina,” her obsession with dualities, and Chicano and Indigenous history in Denver.
Navigation
“The whiteboy said there was nothing left for me in Houston, he said that I didn’t have to punish myself, and he said my name, my actual name.”
Helen Oyeyemi on ‘Gingerbread,’ Fairy Tales, and What Self-Branding Is Doing to Childhood
“I was thinking a lot about childhood as this special status, an almost endangered status … that is eroded the more that we start thinking of ourselves as these units of value and worrying about what we’re worth.”
If You Were a Sack of Cumin
In the midst of the Syrian Civil War, three grown siblings attempt to fulfill their father’s final wish. The journey is dangerous, but that’s no surprise; nowadays, death is always hard work.
Joe Scapellato on “The Made-Up Man” and the Myth of the Self
In Scapellato’s new novel, a man is pulled into a noir detective mystery he doesn’t want to solve.
