by Hawa Allan
As a card-carrying member of the horde, I have never had the privilege of having only one voice echoing in my head. I have always had multiple voices singing in mine. The call, and the response.
FICTION | NONFICTION | POETRY |
TRANSLATION
SUBMIT STORE DONATE OPPORTUNITIES INTERVIEWS WRITERS WE PUBLISH
by Hawa Allan
As a card-carrying member of the horde, I have never had the privilege of having only one voice echoing in my head. I have always had multiple voices singing in mine. The call, and the response.
by Caroline Coleman
Shortly before I started reading my favorite novel of 2019, my beautiful 23 year old daughter stopped communicating with me. I didn’t know it then, but it would be almost a year before I saw her again.
by Michael Barron
What would happen if all works in all languages were universally readable? New forms of thinking, new colors for the literary palette, and ultimately, the possibility of atypical influences. To put an old trope on its head, everything has been invented, but not every invention has been discovered.
by Yoojin Na
Levy, who cries on escalators, doesn’t hate her children. She doesn’t hate her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Rather, she hates that a woman must extend herself to assume a domestic role and become a stranger to the person she once was.
by Gracie Bialecki
The more the French view me as part of their country, the more I see myself as belonging here with them. With my blonde hair and daily scarves, I look the part. It’s easier to accept superficial validation such as compliments on my accent and cultural ease from the French than it is to reconcile my fading American patriotism.
by Siena Oristaglio
Two performers, Asun Noales and Sebastian Rowisnki,
stand in a circle of small jaguar heads.
The heads are sculpted from pearl-white plastic
by an artist named Susana Guerrero.
The heads are perfectly identical.
Their mouths stretch agape, as if caught mid-roar.
Beyond rows of jagged teeth,
each throat swells with inky black.
by Tess Crain
Having read, last year, with a certain stringent intensity, I tried to be more omnivorous and relaxed about my choices in 2019. Perhaps because of this, I’m not sure which books were the best. Here are five, however, ranging from the second to the twenty-first century in origin and including both fiction and nonfiction, that made a singular impression—all also share a probing interest in the human relationship to scale.
by Robb Todd
"I loved that, no matter where the characters went underground, they came out into the same space," said Mack, who might be best known for his two-decade run in the Village Voice with the comic strip “Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies." "I could see a double-paged spread showing a huge old fashioned attic — full of the different entry points. To me, the story said, whatever you think you know about the rules of life, forget it, ain’t necessarily true."
by Zack Graham
It’s that time of year again. The late capitalist clusterfuck some call the holiday season. Or, as literary folks know it, “Best Of” Hell.
by Caroline Hagood
My love affair with monsters can be traced to my eccentric childhood, of course.
by Tess Crain
I began reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend (1947), in mid-2016, casually. I’d bought the book by mistake several years prior, thinking it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s version—that is, the seminal German Faust. I am not the first to have confused the two authors.
by Frances Nguyen
The Great Disappearing
It helps to know, especially
when you’re hiding.
by Lana Spendl
Suada stood in her curlers at the kitchen table and cut with scissors into a cardboard box. Her brother, who had remained with his family in Norway even after the war had ended, had sent her a package for her birthday. She ripped the last bit of the tape with her fingers and opened the flaps.
