Flour Baby
Ms. Bird stood in front of the class, holding a bag of flour. “You’ll dress up your flour babies, you’ll name your flour babies, and your flour babies will go everywhere with you for two weeks.”
Interview
Darin Strauss: Beyond Biography
The writer on blending fiction and memoir, and exploring the nature of celebrity.
Interview
Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Everything that Made Us Still Belongs to Us
The writer of a poetic trilogy on listening to ancestral voices, Black feminism, and seeing salvation in marine mammals.
Interview
Chana Joffe-Walt: Nice White Parents
The producer of the hit podcast talks about how race and power shape public education, and what it will take to create a more equitable system.
Fiction
The Mighty Oak
He kept meaning to get back to Boston. From Texas. From Florida where he was before Texas. He hasn't seen his daughter. He's ashamed that it will take his own mother's funeral for him to see her, to see Kate for the first time in four years.
Essay
Certification of Righteousness
Taking her cue from biblical assassins, a young Mormon woman struggles to break free.
Review
The Music in Her Head
David Hadju’s novel offers a postmodern portrait of a postmodern artist.
Interview
Back Draft: Emma McMillan
The painter on frottage, a decorative rebellion, and the destruction of the traditional family unit.
Essay
Elsie Conick: A Biography in Fragments
In 1918, she became the first Black woman tennis player to appear on the cover of an American magazine.
Interview
Shruti Swamy: The Intensity of Language
The writer on confronting fear on the page, motherhood, and how stories help us make meaning.
Review
On One’s Land
Kendra Atleework's memoir Miracle Country embraces a dangerous, and endangered, land.
Review
Objects of Curiosity
Elena Ferrante's latest novel, The Lying Life of Adults, is a marvelous blur.
Profile
How To Corrupt the Youth
For Briana Toole, philosophy is the key to helping young people understand the world around them—and stand up for themselves.
Essay
Fever in the Woods
Tucked far away with my children, this is where I feel safest and most afraid.