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THERE ARE TWO versions to this story: She (Penny, my sister) fell to her death on an old-fashioned, cobble-stoned street called Bastugatan, near Stockholm's Old Town. (The look and feel [...]

1 I have a lot of references more than enough 2 the referent is me and I'm proud of it 3 I mirror myself and spawn with pain forming families [...]

This morning, something in my doubt dissolves. The footprint or the transparency of floors. The wells open up. Sometimes, the wells close again. The added materials have not allowed the [...]

THE FOLLOWING ACCOUNTS are drawn from the 350 interviews I conducted for an oral history published in 2003, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides. That book is long--549 [...]

SHE DOESN'T CALL IT sneaking out even though she puts her work clothes in her purse and carries her heels in her hands to the car. It isn't sneaking out [...]

WE ARE TWO girls in a public pool on the hottest in a string of scorching summer days. Out of all the summers we've been coming here, we're sure there's [...]

VICTOR REGINO is not worried that tonight, when he returns to the ring after a hiatus of thirteen years, the crowd will call him a geezer or that his rival [...]

RUSS BRINGS ALL the wrong books to my hospital room, which is tucked into a corner of the birthing center. How was he to know I'd already finished that novel? [...]

BENEVOLENCE is the third play in The Till Trilogy, exploring the epic saga of civil rights icon Emmett Louis Till, the Chicago teenager whose fateful trip to Mississippi in the [...]

If working alone or in a giant mill those who make hats still have common cause to groan: goods so quickly sewn, loose, of unskilled hem; and taken for a [...]

FOR THOSE FEW chased heartbeats until he'd adapted to it, stepping inside Reilly's was like being struck suddenly blind. If you entered by the main door, from Ballinraha's main street [...]

ONE DAY, I FOUND the fingernail clippings. I opened the drawer of the sewing machine where my mother kept her spools of thread and there they were, wrapped in paper. [...]

MIKE OUSLEY is an Appalachian artist quickly gaining attention both regionally and nationally. Ousley's work has been exhibited and published widely. Ousley has been featured twice in Artmaze Magazine's international [...]

NICHOLAS IS FILTHY. He knows this from the faces of the men he is with. They are painted with dirt and ash from the brims of their helmets down to [...]

EVERY DAY, the sun sets twice over Manhattan. First, the sunsink: the sun hangs for a few hours overhead, lighting up congested intersections, then it sinks beneath the shoulder-to-shoulder skyscrapers [...]

THE DOGS IN ALMATY were slim, pensive, and silent. They went about in pairs, and curiously always complementary pairs: a small black dog would go around with a shaggy blond [...]

THAT SUMMER IN SUMNER is the middle drama in The Till Trilogy, a three-play cycle exploring the epic saga of Emmett Till and the birth of the modern Civil Rights [...]

The Ballad of Emmett Till explores the life and afterlife of Emmett Till, a Chicago teenager who takes a fateful trip to Mississippi in the summer of 1955. He goes [...]

THE WAITING ROOM for movement disorders at Mayo Clinic hums with nervous life. A teenager dressed all in pink--from her shoes to her headband--waits in a bricolage motorized wheelchair, yelping [...]

NO FORM OF ART can express a life quite like the novel. No art form charts the lives of individuals--encounters, challenges, and relationships- -as successfully as the book-length work of [...]

BEFORE I MET DANNY, I wanted to go home. I missed my dog, Bob. Every time I saw a small fluffy thing on the street, I'd start crying. There are [...]

HE HAD JUST come back from hut-to-hut hiking in Austria, and I was dragged out by a co-worker who thought I had mourned enough for a man she had dismissed [...]

1. BALLET AND CIRCUS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, a new foot was invented through the invention of toe shoes. Toe shoes are the material precondition for ballet. The ballerina dances [...]

DID YOU KNOW? When the ball of the foot is pressed against the floor, some people's little toes never touch the ground. Too short, they float midair. The rest of [...]

UNTIL I MOVED to Socorro, I did not know about sandhill cranes, about their migratory habits and flight paths, their winter homes and loud congregations. Named for the sand dunes [...]

Cut yourself on the refrigerator light in the kitchen, & tell no one that you meant to unsheath the rain. Cure your thirst by swallowing the bath -water inside the [...]

but it happened, here, on American soil: West Philadelphia, 1985, the year most of the country remembers for the Chicago Bears' 'Super Bowl Shuffle,' reducing the massacre to a footnote [...]

It is nighttime, and they are synchronously bombing Baghdad, Damascus and me! I sit on the couch and press the button, switching on my tormentor. The news says nothing of [...]

THE WOMAN WHO was once caught by the air raid siren while she was taking a bath was most afraid of dying like that--without her panties, naked, with wet hair [...]

Profile of a solitary man, in shirt sleeves, whose pose of sharpening a blade suggests he is a knife grinder. Often called The Spy, since he seems to be listening [...]

In the village we let the nail go deep into the foot until picking up tetanus like a surprise. We watch each other live, we turn to see every car [...]

There is an old joke I heard one winter, one popular among the farmers from Trondelag to Nord-Norge: two deer run along the railroad. One says to the other, we [...]

1 the sticky shitmarker scammy scoundrel making chatterings chitchat and lies encloses his realm of nonsense by bellowing at bellycrawlers with fairytales of piping-hot boiled meats and boiled lexemes it's [...]

I helped you trudge through blue desert suns-- not your padre: that cobarde threw you under them to cry choking on cold dry dust and behold the night skies grow [...]

I wish to be a poet, it matters little, not, if my talent modest, the path I walk a knot. Faustino Xavier de Novais Sensing my own dullness like volcanic [...]

Left-handed poet, he joins the mad. Grasshopper, swan, none can resist reading his works, hard though it is! Faustino Xavier de Novais Huddled in my little nook, calmly casting out [...]

and, in the end, I'm of one mind on this. The smartest call the showrunners ever made was reducing Piper's screen time. A satisfying story would never be about her, [...]

Is the lost word 'Liberty?' Barefoot and open-palmed, one musket between us, them. Between a goddess, Columbia, and a person enslaved. Each with one hand holding the wood and iron [...]

ROOKS were once, historically, 'Rukhs; ' primal and full, turning hungry, small figures into emptied wood. They're horizontally or vertically moving Castles burdened for war, through stolen ivory. The colonizing [...]

WHAT, ULTIMATELY, IS the true way of this world? Our answer will depend, in no small part, on our perspective. When the hurricane hits, Shakespeare's Ferdinand is the first to [...]

A RECENT COVER STORY IN HARPER'S asked the question 'What Happened to Gen X?' Written by the Canadian-American philosophy professor Justin E. H. Smith, the piece opens with memories of [...]

Susan Glickman, Artful Flight: Essays and Reviews 1985-2019 Erin: Porcupine's Quill, 2022 256 pages, $24.95, ISBN 9780889848795 Susan Glickman--poet, fiction writer, scholar, essayist, and visual artist-draws from a life in [...]

MEL SPOTTED THE STORY IN THE OTTAWA CITIZEN and brought it over the same night. We'd both moved back home after graduate school, so she waited until my stepfather Raymond [...]

I HAD BEEN PESTERING THE FUNDY GYPSUM COMPANY for over a month without getting a response. My older brother Jack and I were living together in the North End of [...]

EPIC, LYRIC, GOTHIC, CRYPTIC, APOCALYPTIC-each of these terms applies to Cormac McCarthy's last novel, The Passenger (2022). Although the title refers to a missing passenger aboard a small aircraft that [...]

MY DAD SAID TO ME, 'We're going to take a zero day, no matter what your mom says. We're drenched as a drowned dog.' Rogaine, the dog we picked up [...]

IN WARM WEATHER, I CANT ESCAPE MRS. LEWIS. No matter how quickly I walk, she is always at the end of the double driveway between our two houses. This Saturday [...]

FELIX WAS AN ONLY CHILD, and his parents didn't like to be called mom or dad or mama or papa or any of the other words people used. They preferred [...]

ON THE MORNING WE HIGHTAILED IT AWAY FROM DAD in New Hampshire and moved to Burrostucky Park in Maine, the housing manager, a woman with feather earrings and a tight [...]

ONE DAY SHE'S CHOCOLATE-FACED UP TO HER ELBOWS in the batter bowl, sugar-grin ecstasy, but not afraid because her mother never taught her to be afraid of being happy, and [...]