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What’s an Autodidact?

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The journalist and biographer Jason McBride and I have some confusion about how we first met—definitely before we were in Germany together for a symposium. The marathon reading of Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School we both took part in? The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery? KGB Bar in New York’s […]

Drag in Tbilisi

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The drag scene in Tbilisi exists in defiance. In a country where queer expression can invite violence or arrest, to perform in drag is to take a calculated risk. The shows unfold in basements and backrooms, improvised spaces of safety and solidarity in a culture that grants little of either. Jonathan Moore, a London-based photographer […]

Spying on Amelia

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When Laurie Gwen Shapiro talks about Harriet the Spy, it isn’t casual. Harriet is her ur-text, her compass. She discovered Louise Fitzhugh’s book as a Manhattan schoolgirl and never really put it down again, at least not in the ways that matter. Harriet, notebook in hand, slinking through the streets of Manhattan in search of […]

Fear, Love, and Sally Bowles

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Few writers have shaped our cultural imagination quite like Christopher Isherwood. His Berlin stories gave us Sally Bowles and ultimately Cabaret, but his influence extends far beyond Weimar. Across novels, memoirs, and diaries, he chronicled the anxieties of modern life, the search for spiritual meaning, and the long, difficult journey toward queer liberation. Katherine Bucknell […]

The Celebration of My Birth

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1: The Celebration of my Birth I am the eldest son of a deeply traditional family from Raqqa, a city that was once enchanted. And still is… A city that stood alone on the banks of the Euphrates River. Anyone born there could live an innocent life, just as I did. Born in 1991, I […]

Me, My Sister, and I

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My sister E’s first cataclysmic crack-up was in 2020 and played out in slow motion between March and June. Between her impending meltdown and the coronavirus, we’re all at home in a state of extreme, abiding tension. E and myself, my mom, my dad. I had gone home because New York was under lockdown and […]

Reasoning with Love

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(a free translation of Sorley MacLean’s “A Chìall ‘s a Ghràidh”) If our language said that sense is equivalent to love it lied. When I saw your face I had no sense of love’s asymmetries. When I heard your voice it didn’t crack open my chest at first. But love breached, unnoticed, and ripped apart […]

Ten Books: Nathan Englander

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A master of fiction whose work wrestles with moral complexity, cultural identity, and the absurdity of the human condition, Nathan Englander’s choice of ten favorite books offers a glimpse into the influences that shape his voice. From the surreal satire of Gogol’s The Nose to the poetic gravitas of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, consider these ten […]

The Art of Maigret

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Just before the world shut down in 2020, I took on an unusual assignment—curating a library for a luxury apartment building in downtown Manhattan. The space was vast, stretching on either side of an atrium tall enough to accommodate a small grove of graceful silver birch trees. The job seemed straightforward at first, but I’d […]