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memoir

A man sitting in profile against a lilac-colored background, wearing a well-tailored pinstripe suit. He also has a giant plastic head in place of his actual head, and is giving a thumbs-up gesture to the camera.
Posted inReading List

Pawns, Puppet Heads, and Paranoia: An Eccentrics Reading List

by Chris Wheatley January 31, 2023January 30, 2023

“They’re a little eccentric” is a phrase I suspect most of us have heard used to describe a certain kind of memorable person. For me, it evokes my childhood dentist — an elderly man who favored colorful bow ties and humming loudly as he worked, and who once wagged his finger in my face and […]

Author Sorayya Khan at left, and at right, the cover of her new memoir, "We Take Our Cities With Us"
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Feature, Profiles & Interviews, Story

“I Am In Between”: A Q&A with Sorayya Khan

by Longreads November 3, 2022November 3, 2022

Author Sorayya Khan on what it means to grow up between two cultures, and on mothering and being mothered in a global world.

Rear view of a boy lying on the floor who is drawing a picture of his two moms
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Story

Families Like Ours: A Reading List for the Children of Queer Parents

by Melissa Hart June 28, 2022October 19, 2022

Some of us got to stay with our moms or dads. Others did not.

Posted inEditor's Pick

The Gradual Extinction of Softness

by Cheri Lucas Rowlands November 9, 2021December 13, 2022

“The memory of hunger is a curse that never leaves you.”

Posted inEditor's Pick

Cresting the Wave

by Cheri Lucas Rowlands November 2, 2021October 19, 2022

“A surfer comes to grips with a dark family secret born from the swells near Bob Hall Pier.”

Posted inEditor's Pick

John Updike, His Stories, and Me

by Cheri Lucas Rowlands October 25, 2021October 19, 2022

“But now I’ve been a writer for 30 years, I can understand the impulses that I and he and probably every other writer have: to go after a subject we’re compelled by.”

Posted inEditor's Pick

Grace: An Unfinished Draft, A Fire

by Cheri Lucas Rowlands September 3, 2021October 19, 2022

“In Texas—Georgia—in Alabama—all over this vast canvas of fear that we call America, women will die. They won’t have time to run away. They will be great-Aunts only in name, and in death. And their deaths will disappear into a language made and remade by men to cover their shitty sins.”

Posted inEditor's Pick

Searching for a Lost Odessa — and a Deaf Childhood

by Cheri Lucas Rowlands August 24, 2021October 19, 2022

“When I turn the hearing aids on in these streets, my parents are dead again. So, I turn them off.”

Posted inEditor's Pick

The Night Gary Drove Me Home

by Cheri Lucas Rowlands June 29, 2021October 19, 2022

“It is not a normal thing to do—to acknowledge to yourself that you may have slept with a serial killer.”

Posted inStory

Road Grad

by Jill Talbot June 24, 2021October 18, 2022

Jill Talbot on secret messages between mother and daughter.

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