Clik here to view.
The Pearl Pavilion
Photo by Hikarinoshita Hikari on Unsplash Vanessa Hua’s latest novel, Forbidden City, is the story of an ambitious, savvy teenage girl and her rise to power alongside the leader of China’s cultural...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Alan Chin’s Infinity Goes Up on Trial
<►>Brian Palmer at a veteran’s grave in Evergreen Cemetery, in Richmond, Virginia. Some of the city’s most notable Black residents — bankers, editors, doctors, ministers, funeral directors,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Raw Material
Illustration by Nasreen Chaudhri I have folders of material that I didn’t use in We Take Our Cities With Us: A Memoir. At various points, I wrote about images that I’d excavated during the research...
View ArticleClik here to view.
On Waking in a Stranger’s Room
Photo by Thomas Quine via Flickr The Foghorn Echoes is, fundamentally, an epic: the story of two men, two cities, and between them, love and a war. Set in Damascus and Vancouver, it is the second...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hospital Journal
Image from The Ecological Relations of Roots “Once my father became someone transformed and once I was a part of transforming him, into ash, into pollution, into bagged teeth sent away, the world of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Girl Can Dream —
Photo by Mir Rajjak via Pexels A girl can dream — hold her breath through the fire run past the cutthroats and gossips and thorns. The villains that would touch her hair, the husbands that would break...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Little Love
Photo by Jeswin Thomas via Pexels When his first child was born, Anjan Sundaram was torn between the new world of fatherhood and the old world of work — more specifically, conflict journalism. As his...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Draw Me
Image via Unsplash Ruth Madievsky’s much-anticipated debut novel, All-Night Pharmacy, begins with the narrator’s sister, Debbie, preparing them for a night out in East Hollywood. Brows are plucked,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hauntings
Photo by Eva Bronzini via Pexels In Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s novel, Promise, the Kindred sisters are on the cusp of change, bounding toward and through adolescence. The small New England community...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Always Someone Leaving
Image via Unsplash One day before the fall of Saigon, an infant Beth Nguyen was carried by her father out of the country and toward a new life in the United States. But her mother stayed — “or was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
After the Murder
Aftermath of a riot in Washington, D.C., following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s funeral in 1968. Photography by Warren K. Leffler, via the Library of Congress. Donovan X. Ramsey grew up in Columbus,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Paradox
Illustration by Prachi Gupta It’s not very often that the word “necessary” in a book review feels, well, necessary. And yet, more than perhaps any other book to come across my desk this year, I want...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Go More on Each Gallon
Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash There’s a special kind of torture in writing novels. It is, of course, The Beginning. Twitter threads and the conferences and podcasts insist, at decibels that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Solidarność
Stock image There must be as many works of art on the horrors humanity has endured as there are horrors. More, one might think, but our ever-evolving human history suggests otherwise — or, rather, a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What Should Men Do with Their Hands?
"Remembering Vienna III" by Camille Billops via the Minneapolis Institute of Art My enthusiasm for pockets has never failed to surprise the men who overhear it. They respond as if it is I, not the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Strangers in India
Photo by Nicola Fioravanti on Unsplash In Thrity Umrigar’s tenth novel, Museum of Failures, Remy Wadia returns to India to care for his ailing mother. Beset by guilt for the distance he kept from her...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Allegiance
The author in her Brownie uniform. Photo courtesy of the author. Susan Kiyo Ito has been torn for most of her life between telling and not telling her story. “Since the start of my life, I have been a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“The Last Time I Came to Burn Paper”
Photo by Yolanda Suen / Unsplash There are much easier ways to write a debut novel, but Aube Rey Lescure has decided to have none of ease. River East, River West is an intergenerational epic, the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Glove
Glove of Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett with wrapping inscribed by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. From the Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Photo by Laura McNeal. It’s hard to imagine history...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Arrivals and Departures
Photo courtesy of the author Much of Grace Loh Prasad’s needed debut, The Translator’s Daughter, is about the aftermath of a choice she didn’t make. When she was only two years old, her parents fled...
View Article