A Lineage of Nonconsent
June 13, 2022
Lately, the blood I carry feels like the story of everything.
Guernica
A Magazine of Global Arts & Politics
Lives
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A Discarded Shirt
March 14, 2022
Behind me is the luggage compartment, and in it is my father.
Lives
How to Apply Makeup
February 24, 2022
My scars are too deep, too wide, too fucked up to be smoothed over.
Lives
The Plague Legends
December 1, 2021
I’ve come across these legends in my life before, but only occasionally. Never so many at once.
Lives
Breathe In
November 29, 2021
If I had known, maybe I would have paused before so completely surrendering my body to the US military.
Lives
Departures
November 3, 2021
I was still working out how to live in the shadow of my mother's absence, just as I had learned to live with all that had been lost of our homeland.
Lives
Gettysburg
October 27, 2021
I could not figure out what someone of my skin color would have been doing in the 88th Volunteer Infantry, or any other regiment for that matter.
Lives
One Man’s Pest
October 13, 2021
In the urban Amazon, black vultures are a threat to aviation — but otherwise a boon, however distasteful, to humans.
Lives
Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Divided City
September 29, 2021
A map-maker works to get basic amenities in his community. An excerpt from the book, out now.
Lives
This Town Has Become a Museum
September 21, 2021
This is life in a dwindling community eroding by the day, adagio, slowly, like a seaside cliff.
Lives
Benzo Mama
September 7, 2021
I am a boy, but I’m not a boy like my brother. Still, neither am I a girl like my sister. “Janie, be a weed,” Mom says.
Lives
Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse
August 4, 2021
The Lebanese novelist captures the months before the deadly explosion. An excerpt from his new book, out today.
Lives
At the Bend of the Road
July 20, 2021
On the Camino de Santiago, a female pilgrim walks in solitude—utterly vulnerable, utterly free.
Lives
Hell Is A City in Texas
June 14, 2021
The first time I see him, I want this guy on my side. And so we become friends, mainly because I listen to his stories.
Lives
Coming Home to Somewhere Unfamiliar
April 26, 2021
In an excerpt from her memoir Negative Space, Lilly Dancyger writes about moving back to New York City as a teenager and grappling with her father's death.
Lives
Charting the Land of Great Loneliness
April 13, 2021
At your wedding, you set out on a two-person expedition toward a place you try to envision but have never seen. Later, you may wake one morning alone under an alien sky and wonder how you ever came to be here.
Lives
Lineal Gaps
April 6, 2021
For the women in my family, is it the holes left by absence that cleave us together?
Lives
There’s No Simple Way to Make it OK
March 31, 2021
I was enamored with the notion that all I had to do to drive the sadness away, to have something to look forward to, was open a can of meadows.
Lives
We Were All We Had
August 6, 2020
Even before I knew I was the only American citizen among us, I felt responsible for protecting my family.
Lives
Twelve Poems by Female Fighters
July 28, 2020
Translated by Muna Gurung, Meena Kandasamy, and Jessica Rainey.
Lives
Summer Camp 1968
July 15, 2020
I felt a guilt like some radioactive isotope whose half-life has not yet expired.
Lives
In the Dead of Night
June 17, 2020
If my daughter remembers anything from this time, it will be the waiting.
Lives
Baking Through a Plague
June 12, 2020
On one of her monthly brownie runs, my mom caught her first glimpse of the monster coming our way.
Lives
Surprised by Grief, Soothed by Korean Television Drama
May 18, 2020
When my father’s death dissolved my life’s plot, I could only cling to someone else’s story.
Lives
Fear in the Time of the Javelina
May 13, 2020
A younger boy swore he’d seen one of the pigs standing on its hind legs, peering through his trailer window.
Lives
Family Man
April 15, 2020
I never knew my uncle. But it's the absence of inquiry that feels most disquieting.
LivesPhotography
Faery Land
March 24, 2020
“Don’t take chances,” he said. “Given your history.” But chances, not history, are what we’re given.
Lives
With Jazz on the Turntable and a Drink in His Hand
January 22, 2020
In the dark nights after long days, the music gave our fathers something to cling to.
Lives
Translation and the Family of Things
October 29, 2019
A young writer discovers her grandmother’s literary secret.
Lives
Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl
September 30, 2019
In an excerpt from her new memoir, Jeannie Vanasco grapples with whether, and how, to approach the boy who raped her fourteen years before.
EssayLives
Jasmine Fingers
August 22, 2019
How does the poem keep us there? in memory? in the traces? keep us coming back?
Lives
Bahrain on Horseback
August 14, 2019
The author returns to the landscape of her childhood to discover it has disappeared, along with many political dissidents.
Lives
Beautiful in the Distance
June 24, 2019
The tick doesn’t know that it is strong enough to kill a full-grown human. It only knows that it is hungry.
Lives
Where Disease Stopped and My Brother Began
June 21, 2019
Coming to terms with a sibling's suicide.
Lives
The Power of High Heels
June 19, 2019
Not necessarily for the male gaze, heels can exemplify an assertive personality, a refusal to be ignored.
Lives
Mr. Rain Jacket
May 20, 2019
Homeless, solitary, and schizophrenic, my brother had nothing to shield him from everybody else.
Lives
Letters to Mothers: Crones, Hags, Witches, and Killjoys
May 15, 2019
Mother’s Day is a joke we are all in on, and yet it continues—straight-faced, deadly serious, and poisoned.
Lives
Squirrel King
May 9, 2019
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.
Lives
Life and Death in West Virginia
April 5, 2019
I’m in a haunted place, in my home and in my body.
Lives
Escaping Paradise
April 1, 2019
How my family barely got away from the deadliest fire in California history.
Lives
The Grandmother Character
March 19, 2019
I thought: I would never write a fictional scene like this, because it was too obvious—the art butting up against reality, as though my story held some kind of portentous power.
FictionLives
The Disaster Store
March 18, 2019
My daughter is a more realistic judge of character than I, less likely to give someone the benefit of the doubt. Is this man, for instance, trying to save our lives or make a buck?
EssayLives
Dancing Alvin Ailey’s Revelations in Black and Brown
March 15, 2019
How can I perform a story that isn’t mine to tell?
EssayLives
An Apex of Babble
March 6, 2019
I grew up in a community where the phenomenon of speaking in tongues (called glossolalia by linguists) is more than just some loaves-and-fishes Sunday School curiosity.
Lives
How To Bury Your Dead Pet Monkey
February 25, 2019
Rivalry, longing, practical jokes, and unrecognized genius in a 1980s children’s theater.
EssayLives
The History Before Us
January 21, 2019
How can we be sure the atrocities of the past will stay in the past?
EssayLives
Our Last Days in Country
November 29, 2018
A young Marine on being eighteen and deployed a few miles from the D.M.Z., meeting girls and waiting for ghosts.
Lives
Late-Life Love
October 23, 2018
Old lovers know that love does not conquer all, that our intimacy cannot establish a safe haven somewhere, someplace, for us.
Lives
On the Edge of Seventeen
October 19, 2018
A teenage boy, a violent incident, and twenty years of reckoning.
Lives
Fragments From a War-Torn Childhood
September 12, 2018
The Iran-Iraq war that made me who I am ended thirty years ago. Keeping quiet will not make it go away. I don’t believe in talking through it, either. Between silence and speech lies the act of writing. This is where I seek my remedy.
Lives
When Naming Isn’t Enough
August 31, 2018
No matter how inexperienced I was, I didn't deserve what he did.
Lives
Caravan for the Disappeared
May 24, 2018
A Salvadoran woman looks for a sister who went missing while trying to make it to America.
Lives
Animals Died at Our House, and Other Things that Burn or Wear Away
May 7, 2018
There was the time I found an entire horse or cow skeleton laid neatly on top of the shed roof. When I asked my brothers what it was doing there, they looked at me patiently and said, We found it in the desert.
Lives
Hello Blood: The Dance of Miscarriage
May 7, 2018
The baby stayed in the desert. I myself stayed in darkness for a long time.
Lives
The Next Morning
March 14, 2018
There was one name and one name only, just hers over and over and over.
Lives
I Used to Give Men Mercy
February 12, 2018
On the journey from webcam girl to professor and breakout memoirist, and not letting white academia drag her down.
Lives
Letter from a Target-Rich Environment
January 10, 2018
In an age where mass shootings can transform malls or classrooms into war-zones, teachers are getting new training: combat vigilance.
Lives
Doctor of Refugees
December 10, 2017
You never get used to seeing dead refugee children, or women who died giving birth on a wrecked boat, their tiny babies still attached to them by the umbilical cord.
EssayLives
Black Girl Going Mad
December 4, 2017
Mental health, race, and trauma in the city of Good Christian Bitches.
Lives
How to Explain to Your Son Why White Supremacists Are Marching on Your Town
November 6, 2017
Reckoning with racism and violence at home in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Lives
Primed for Mysticism and Scared to Death
October 23, 2017
A writer reckons with Judaism, the writing life, and the allure of fundamentalism.
Lives
Waiting for Hurricane Irma
September 27, 2017
Me, myself, and Sarasota: a meditation on real and metaphorical storms.
EssayLives
Writer-in-Residence at a Homeless Shelter
September 25, 2017
A teacher chronicles his month in a Colorado facility, where charmers and conmen offer advice and trauma is tallied by number.
Lives
Kiss, Kiss
August 31, 2017
My son does not give kisses. He devours. He will take your face in both hands and open his mouth wide and seek to encapsulate the whole of you.
Lives
Svetlana Alexievich: A Poet of People
August 30, 2017
The “Nobel laureate of Russian misery” reaches American readers, and new heights.
Lives
Larry Clark’s Teenage Lust, and My Own
July 13, 2017
As a teenager, I was obsessed with a sexy photograph. When I grew up, it looked different.
AudioLivesNews
The Fallout
July 10, 2017
In St. Louis, America's nuclear history creeps into the present, leaching into streams and bodies.
Lives
What Seems to Be the Problem, Officer?
June 5, 2017
Before his arrest, my father was a local hero for putting bad guys behind bars.
Lives
The Last Ten Entries of Ren Hang’s Depression Diary
May 26, 2017
The photographer and poet, before ending his life.
Lives
After the Earthquake
May 22, 2017
Oral histories on life, death, and survival in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Lives
Until the Last Dog Is Hung
April 17, 2017
Crime, addiction, and religion meet at the greyhound race track.
EssayLives
Doll in Shadow
March 24, 2017
Alzheimer's destroyed my mother's memory, but she remembered the doll.
Lives
Out of the Iron Closet
March 20, 2017
In search of acceptance, a gay Russian man seeks asylum in the United States.
Lives
Man Without Fear
January 12, 2017
On an island, marred by a bloody past, a poet falls in love.
Lives
George Plimpton and Papa in Cuba
January 2, 2017
When Ernest Hemingway agreed to his famous Paris Review interview, he had no idea he’d be helping the CIA.
Lives
On Coupling: An Inventory
October 19, 2016
“I want both: marriage and lovers, freedom and security. I want my husband to say yes to this.”
Lives
What Was Left Behind
September 5, 2016
A daughter shares her father's first responder story about searching for bodies at Ground Zero.