Issues

There exists a certain genre I’ve grown to love. I will describe it as “writer struggling with a historical failure.” I don’t mean that the failure itself is historic, but rather that the artist is failing to write about or depict a historical figure, most often another writer or artist. The genre includes books like Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage (the narrator struggling with a biography of D. H. Lawrence), the recent gem Doireann

Realizing I am a witch has been a life-long, gradual process, but if I had to choose one event to mark my entry into full witchy power, it would be the ritual I created to heal and transform after my abortion at age forty-three. At that time, my husband and I had two young children and two growing careers; we agreed bringing another life into our family would negatively impact its overall well-being. The abortion

Illustrations by Maya Tuncel The July that Woody Allen died was the July I drove off the cliff and lived. Woozy on Vicodin, I said to the nurse, “Thank god he’s finally kicked it.” The hospital TV did not show his most recent self, withered and bent as if against a constant wind, but his young, first-in-love face. When I went off the cliff I thought, This car is going to be totally totaled. I

Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco in My Brilliant Friend, season 2. Courtesy of HBO. Sometimes friendships survive because of the things we don’t say. A few weeks ago, I was walking with a fellow writer down a short trail in Bread Loaf, Vermont, when our conversation turned to our shared love for Elena Ferrante. She told me, after some hesitation, that reading the Neapolitan Novels had left her feeling almost “sick” and “injured,” that the

The Raincoats’s debut self-titled album (Rough Trade, 1979). We have felt sometimes a lack of understanding from some people about what we’re doing. . . . The label tagged on us was feminism—what else? And although we feel that sexual roles are not questioned enough and therefore sickly defined, they are not our only concern and the isolation in whichevery human being seems to be confined hits me very deeply each time I think . . . Subscriber

 In October 2021, the culture site Lit Hub published a cheeky advice column by Walker Caplan. To help readers define “autofiction,” the piece offers ten grounding principles for whether a work falls under its purview. They range from “autofiction is when a character lives in New York” to “when you write about something bad you’ve done, that’s autofiction. When you write about something bad done to you, that’s memoir.” Albeit satirical, the list elucidates enduring

Naudline Pierre, ‘Too Much, Not Enough,’ 2019 2020. Oil on canvas, 60 × 40 in. For as long as I could remember, I wanted to be a girl. Even before I knew what it meant to be a girl, what a girl even was, I wanted it. I wanted to be pretty and to be adored in the way that only femmes could be adored. When you see a beautiful femme, it feels like getting