Anjali Enjeti considers her identity in an evolving region in Southbound
…demanding work required of political activists, conveying in brutal detail just how unglamorous campaign work can be. Other essays in the collection reflect an author unafraid to take risks. In…
Book Excerpt: I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World
…it’s the jealousy in me that gives birth to the aftertaste of defiance, whose flavor is not unlike blood, not unlike a Bible opened randomly to procure a message, but…
Natalie Standiford’s Astrid Sees All charts the course of a young friendship in early 1980s New York City
During an uneasy second date with a much older, probably married man, Phoebe Hayes — the narrator of Natalie Standiford’s novel Astrid Sees All — cringes at how provincial and…
J. Nicole Jones conjures her South Carolina family’s storied past in Low Country
…bourbon decanter and not a golden calf. That we had been praying to the alcohol all along explained a few things.” Jones oscillates between loving compassion for those who shaped…
Margaret Renkl weaves personal and natural history in Late Migrations
…learned to read.” The natural histories complement and enlarge the personal ones. Renkl’s wry appraisal of both human and nonhuman animals is affectionate yet unsentimental. From the Nashville suburbs where…
Alan Lightman explores the limits of knowledge in Probable Impossibilities
…universe is necessarily one of a vast number of universes, each of which is constantly and randomly spawning new universes in an unending chain of cosmic creation, extending into the…
