“A surfer comes to grips with a dark family secret born from the swells near Bob Hall Pier.”
memoir
John Updike, His Stories, and Me
“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.”
Grace: An Unfinished Draft, A Fire
“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.”
Searching for a Lost Odessa — and a Deaf Childhood
“When I turn the hearing aids on in these streets, my parents are dead again. So, I turn them off.”
The Night Gary Drove Me Home
“It is not a normal thing to do—to acknowledge to yourself that you may have slept with a serial killer.”
Loving Molly, and Mourning Her: A Husband’s Extraordinary Essay
Blake Butler writes movingly about his late wife, poet Molly Brodak.
Chasing My Father’s Ghost Through the Swiss Alps
James Jung thought he rode the winding narrow roads of the Alps to memorialize his dad. He was wrong.
I Feel Most Southern in the Hip-Hop of My Adolescence
“Joy Priest creates a Southern rap soundtrack of the cars, songs, and forces that sculpted her sense of freedom and confinement coming of age in Louisville, Kentucky, in the early 2000s.”
‘Their Bodies Are Not Considered Their Own’: White Privilege in the Emergency Room
It’s against the law to examine someone without their consent — but one ER doctor’s colleagues do it anyway.
