Literary Nonfiction

When the clinician inserted the tent of seaweed into my cervix, a practice as outdated as Japan’s abortion laws, the tiny stab caused an involuntary jerk and gasp. She firmly pressed one of my knees with her free hand, saying, “Deep breath.” As I exited the room, I nodded, a slight bow to answer hers, …

A binary star system consists of two stars that rotate around a shared center of mass, appearing to orbit each other. To the naked eye, they are indistinguishable, existing as a single point of light in the night sky. Only through a high-powered telescope can the stars be differentiated as they sear the space around …

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 …

Listen to Myle Yan Tay read “Good to Be Busy”: We do not bury our dead in Singapore. We store them—in urns, in stacks, stacks too high to reach. We drop them in the ocean, little vessels sinking to the seafloor. My grandfather on my father’s side, who I call Kong Kong, is in a …

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 …

1 On the morning of December 24, 1979, a woman walking her dog near the Blue Ridge Parkway outside Boone, North Carolina, discovered my grandfather’s near-naked body lying in a ditch, one bullet in his head, nine bullets in his chest. He was sixty-eight; I was twelve. In the spring of the following year, on …

I needed money after the move. That was my excuse. But really I couldn’t bear to live in another house with it, knowing it was in the side table, in the drawer above my vibrator. Unfired for years—so much potential. The inheritance came with a small box of bullets, the cardboard foxed but nearly full, …

As a child I loved all things related to travel. Watching my mother study an open suitcase at home as she puzzled over how to fit an extra pair of walking shoes. The smell of my father’s small leather carry-on. The shiny floors of airports. The taste of Goldfish crackers while waiting to board. And …