I’d heard plenty about how a mother’s devotion to her kids is primal. I got it—I could imagine that sort of wild, beyond-the-brain love, the kind of protectiveness that can sprout claws and incisors. I expected having a child to change my priorities, my routines, my capacity for tenderness and rage. I didn’t expect it …
ROSALIND: They say you are a melancholy fellow. JAQUES: I am so; I do love it better than laughing. —As You Like ItUnderneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character —Oscar Levant, An American in Paris Oscar Levant is a melancholy figure, full of barbed wit, self-loathing, and Rhapsody in Blue, which he …
Someone holds the makeshift beach up from one end, and the world floods, swell surging to one side of the homemade wave machine before the water rushes back, quick, aggressive, eroding bits of the science fair project with violence before softening slowly, slowly. Repetition eventually grinds everything down to nothing. We are supposed to make …
When I was a child, everything was perfect all the time. I was long planned for and executed with great care: my mother dressed me in tailored suits, flounced petticoats, buttons shaped like clocks, sheepskin coats, electric-blue felt, coordinated layers of hot pink and purple, drop waists, sequins, Peter Pan collars with scalloped edges, oversize …
I know an old man who lives at the edge of the world, in Alaska, a town called Bethel. The first people arrived via ice bridge. Now we fly on planes. The old man lives with an old woman, his wife. He built the house they live in. He builds other things too, boats, furniture, …
First thing to understand: its rhythm. The phrase should be scanned like “résumé.” • The fore, middle, and aft vowels are nearly identical, trafficking between the short a, e, and u—assonance achieved by way of obscenity. An R-rated schwa. • Which is to say that in Risky Business Tom Cruise is saying it incorrectly. • …
Literary Nonfiction Editor Kristen Iversen: What I admire most about this essay is the author’s courage in confronting a subject that is both deeply personal and, regrettably and even tragically, part of a wider cultural experience. Montgomery’s memories, lyrical style, skillful metaphors, and forthright engagement with a persistent and often frightening cultural problem are especially …
My mother used to say that the gods were crying when it rained; my father said that they were pissing. That was in the early 2000s, when the news reported on the dangers of acid rain. Singaporeans fooled themselves into believing that the rain smelled sharp and sour, that it pockmarked the concrete sidewalks. Rain …
My friend Michael sends photos of his new flat in the old city. Twenty years on, Lisbon’s alleys are slick with renovation and rain, the stucco of the old squats livid in sunflower yellow. The stone floors are centuries old, but his place is dustless, with a real zebra-hide rug that he’s been dragging from …
Fridays became the day I drove in the late morning from Aurora to Ithaca to see Bruce. Our relationship was limited to the hours we spent in the church he and his wife were renovating—and when he was my professor in our creative writing class. We never left the church and were never seen together. …