Here’s a confession: I’ve never made it through more than a few pages of The Catcher in the Rye,which has resulted in some sheepish sidestepping when I am asked to speak in my capacity as an author of young adult fiction. Admittedly this came up more frequently in the years

VOLUME 3: ISSUE 4
WINTER 2026

That year, I asked only one question and spent a lot of time looking out my apartment’s kitchen window. The view was mostly a three-story ailanthus, its leaves orange and lavender at the end of the day. The phone rang. It was my mother. That year, I didn’t like talking

VOLUME 1: ISSUE 3
JULY/AUGUST 2022

Illustration by Mayra Tuncel. Afterward, Lila felt washed clean. Her face was as bare of makeup as a child’s and her insides had a drained, weightless quality, as though wrung of excess moisture. The hospital bed was stacked with so many pillows, pads, and blankets, it was as though she

FLATIRON, APRIL 2023, 304 PP. HALFWAY THROUGH MONICA Brashears’s debut House of Cotton, the narrator, Magnolia, observes, “Grief makes people slapstick.” Until then, I wasn’t entirely sure what sort of novel I was reading. The story is told by a young woman who takes a very strange job in a

VOLUME 2: ISSUE 2
SUMMER 2023

KNOPF, JUNE 2022, 240 PP. WHAT SORT OF novel is Marcy Dermansky’s Hurricane Girl? This is not an easily answered question, and I suspect it may depend somewhat on the mood of the reader. A book with girl in the title signals a page-turner, and Hurricane Girl does compel us

VOLUME 1: ISSUE 3
JULY/AUGUST 2022