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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 […]

Squid Games

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In 1851, Jean Baptiste Vérany made a promise remarkable for his time—to show sea creatures vividly alive, supple and shifting, rendered in dazzling chromolithographs. Inspired by a red umbrella squid he found washed onto the pebble beach in his hometown of Nice, he began paying fishermen who could bring him other specimens. In total he […]

“Before I Made Her Famous and the Rot Set In”

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“The good times are middling, the bad times are bad,” wrote Edna O’Brien in the summer of 1958 in one of the journals she kept meticulously throughout her life. Then, in red ink—tight, scolding, almost schoolmasterly—came a furious annotation: “but not her fault. Nothing to do with her adolescent vanity.” The interjection wasn’t hers. It […]

NOT YET

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In this short story by Joanna Hershon, one woman must reckon with her mother’s forgotten past, her own unraveling present, and the ache of watching her son grow up and away.

Buttered Toast

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At the new place (and every place was the new place, until they left, when it became the old place), Sarah was assigned to clean. She did not mind. She preferred to keep her hands busy so her mind would stay quiet. She cleaned at the old place. At a few of the old places. […]

The Huma Bird Never Lands

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Back in Iran for the last time, Navid Sinaki bonds with his cousin, Bahar, but when she decides to emigrate, the cruelty of their differences is laid bare.

Ghosts Again

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One afternoon in early October Elena and Yamioletta were finishing warm forty-ouncers on Rey’s porch when Yamioletta offered to drive Elena around. Elena thought it might be like off-roading in the hills, which she had done with Sam and Chris in high school. They drove across the fields under electrical towers and along the fire […]

Michael’s Marriages

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It’s not a long story, but it’s a story as old as time. Michael’s family is filthy rich. They invented Jell-O or something. Michael will never work a day in his life. These are Michael’s marriages. (I have not been married myself.) Marriage #0 This marriage lasted one second. Her smile felt stale. Her tongue […]

Her Past Was Stronger than the Pull of Our Present

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“Let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest.” — O. Henry My mother is the ghost of my life, like her mother was the ghost of hers.  In deciding not to have children, this is how I have ensured no more children will see ghosts. Or become them. In […]

Museum of Beautiful Women

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Natalie Wood’s motion sickness pills / the pajamas Whitney Houston wore for seven months / Caroline Flack’s sweatshirt & matching sleeping mask / the suicide note Margaux Hemingway never wrote / the pink hyacinths in Sharon Tate’s hair on her wedding day / the inkwell Frances Farmer threw at a judge in 1943 / Peg […]