Literary Nonfiction

Associate Editor Andy Sia: Tracing the seams between the outer and the inner world, Jodi Cressman’s quietly observant essay reveals the stratifications of gender and family in a Mennonite and farming household. Among other things, I’m drawn to the animals in this piece, which populate the speaker’s world and take on bigger significance. Listen to Cressman read her …

Assistant Editor Blessing Christopher: Preeti Talwai’s essay lands on the taste buds and ripens into an impactful narrative about time, family, displacement, and chronic illness. It further examines the thin line demarcating what is considered delicious/desirable from the things that are almost sickeningly sweet. Listen to Talwai read “Mango Season”: Mango Season The little patience …

In a fascinating miCRo essay, Fee takes us on a tour of the microwave’s unexpected origin story.

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Guest Literary Nonfiction Editor David Lazar: Allison Field Bell’s “Body Essay” is, indeed, greater than the sum of its parts. This self-forensic, tonally muted work, is a Cartesian revision: We are corporeal, and therefore think about how every inch of us, each discrete part, conjoins body memory along with the memory of our bodies’ pleasures and …

“You ready?” the phlebotomist asks, holding out two vials. I nod and joke, “Sure, I’ve got enough.” He laughs. This is his kind of humor, “Of course you do—twelve gallons’ worth inside. And as soon as I draw this blood,” he tightens the elastic tourniquet around my upper arm, “your brain sends a signal to …

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Compact Jazz recording, 1989Nina Simone, accompanying herself on piano Every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.—Gaston Bachelard In 1980, my mother lay dying. Her death that July guided me north to a high Victorian mansion in upstate New York and, within just three days, to my beloved. He too was mourning—his marriage …