Squirrel King
The city didn’t put stop signs at our suburban corner until I was thirteen. Despite the reckless driving, no one was ever killed. Pet dogs and stray cats weren’t so lucky. Neither were the squirrels.
Interview
Binnie Kirshenbaum: “If you think you shouldn’t say something, say it.”
Writer Binnie Kirshenbaum shares the drafts of her latest novel, Rabbits for Food, and talks to us about writing unreasonable characters.
Interview
Sheila Heti: “All of Living is Thinking”
The author discusses Judaism, visual art, and “the annoying, circular thinking that happens alongside living.”
Video
Presented by SIMA: Hotel USA
This intimate documentary follows a group of refugees as they spend their first night in the United States in a New Jersey roadside motel. Watch here.
Fiction
Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam
I admit I felt something strange as I listened to the popping of the bones as they were devoured by the fire: Murad spoke, and I saw. It was grief. Grief squeezes the heart till you feel you’re about to die and your heart bleeds tears into your eyes.
Poetry
Dream Seminar
Every dream is crowded with faces and bodies— / there are more dreamed people than there are us.
Lives
Mr. Rain Jacket
Homeless, solitary, and schizophrenic, my brother had nothing to shield him from everybody else.
Commentary
Arundhati Roy: “Literature provides shelter”
In this year’s PEN America Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, Arundhati Roy spoke about the power of literature to challenge governments.
Commentary
Six Writers on the Power of Telling the Truth
At a panel at this year’s PEN America World Voices Festival, six writers discuss the empowering effects of sharing difficult experiences.
Commentary
Two “Artists of the Air” on the Limits of Time and Space
At a panel at this year’s PEN America World Voices Festival, high-wire walker Phillippe Petit and extreme-action pioneer Elizabeth Streb discuss their death-defying art.
Lives
Letters to Mothers: Crones, Hags, Witches, and Killjoys
Mother’s Day is a joke we are all in on, and yet it continues—straight-faced, deadly serious, and poisoned.
Interview
Terese Svoboda: Writing the Desert
The author and translator on the changing American region that shaped her thinking.
Review
In Search of an Ending
T Kira Madden's Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls charts a new path forward for millennial memoirs.
