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Scorpion Time

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“My husband and I get into our own bed and lie face to sunburned face. What news do you have, we ask each other. What new things have you heard? Jordan has it, I say. Stephanie. Mark is sure he does but he can’t get tested.”

“The Mountaintop”

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In truth, you still expect to order your life in peace; you continue to long for glamour and passion. To guard against the destinyyou don’t really know, you work furiously. Pensive and unathletic as you are, you haveyour own intricate schedule, with your shopping bags and appointments.You always forget you’re a bag of blood. In […]

“Lucky”

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“How many for this much, fam?”

The black boy means wings, chicken wings. He pulls change from his trousers and puts it on the counter, lifts his cap, scratches under it. Farid looks at the money. “Four,” he guesses.

Ten Books Chosen by Maaza Mengiste

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The Ethiopian novelist picks a lyrical novel in which the central character is a house, a biography of an iconic revolutionary, and a fictional exploration of the real-life trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

The Art of the Essay: Four Masters of the Form Discuss Their Craft

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“The essay is alive; there is no reason to despair,” wrote Virginia Woolf. At the Deep Water Literary Fest in 2019, we gathered four essay writers to discuss how this statement still holds true. While the pandemic made it impossible to meet for a second iteration of the discussion this past year, we find solace by distilling the thoughts offered to us by Alexander Chee, Sloane Crosley, Laura Kipnis, and Luc Sante. This discussion was moderated by professor and poet Sandra Lim.

This Virginia Woolf Lecture on How to Read is Everything

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It is simple enough to say that since books have classes – fiction, biography, poetry – we should separate them and take from each what it is right that each should give us. Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, […]

On the Selflessness of Cats

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In his new book, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life, the philosopher John Gray mines his lifetime studying cats to test the limits of western philosophy. In this extract, Gray asserts that a cat’s lack of self and ability to live in the moment is a strength that humans can only wish they had.

A Very Notting Hill Revolution

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Launching a literary journal in 1974, it turns out, was not all that different to launching one in 2020. You needed two conditions: a pool of talented writers and money.

For Emma Tennant, the descendant of Scottish aristocrats, there was no problem fulfilling the first condition. “I’ve just met Jimmy Ballard,” she writes on the first page of The Burnt Diaries, her account of running a small literary magazine while embarking on a torturous affair (is there any other?) with the poet Ted Hughes, then widely seen as complicit in Sylvia Plath’s suicide.