Emily Strasser’s Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History is a book for our time. In an age when intergenerational trauma is being explored and researched, Strasser is providing us with important work in this genre. In this meticulously researched book, she plunges into the world of her grandfather George. He died long […]
In 2004 I hitchhiked illegally into western Tibet, passing myself off as an Uyghur who had misplaced her identity papers. I got arrested twice, made a daring escape over a frozen mountain, pushed trucks through waterlogged valleys, and got a smashing case of near-fatal pneumonia. I also lost all my underwear (long story) and got […]
Photo by Kevin Seibel on Unsplash The summer I was pregnant, I watched with growing detachment as my breasts asserted themselves and my spreading hips echoed my mother’s. I had the urge to nest—procuring diapers and wet wipes, obsessively dusting, developing a sudden, unexpected interest in scrapbooking—and became, for a short while, someone I […]
The Greeks have a word for the desire to help people in need, explains Dana Sachs in her riveting new account of humanitarian courage, All Else Failed. She then teaches us a concept that seems alien in the extant rendition of America: Philoxenia, or “love of strangers.” In Sachs’s telling, from the shores of the […]
Photo by Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash The road is white, the color of no road anywhere. The white road becomes whiter and narrower as it recedes into a sunless, ochre-tinged sky. Everything is tinged with ochre, except one house, which is all white. The white house looks as if it’s been drawn by a […]
Teow Lim Goh’s Western Journeys delves into the heart of what it means to be an American—and what it means to not be considered American enough. Immigrants, minority peoples, and native peoples all find a place in Goh’s analysis of the American experience. Her essays also probe what it means to be living in a […]
In East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon with Marriage, Rachel Rueckert details her nearly year-long honeymoon, during which she considers the institution of marriage—an unsurprising choice, given her newlywed status. Rueckert’s engaging prose and humor transmit her unflinching interrogation into both cultural understandings of marriage and her past relationships as she unwaveringly pursues answers. […]
John West begins his lyrical and carefully structured memoir, Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery, with a kind of road map for the text that will follow: The past unfolds into the present like a flower opening up its petals, revealing its gold-dusted center. Like, in the beginning was the Word, and then, suddenly, a […]
When I was studying poetry at New York University in the 1990s, my friends and I participated in an event called The Poetry Olympics at Brooklyn Brewery. Each New York City grad school was represented by a team that competed in categories including recitation and instant haiku. The grand prize was a keg of beer. […]
Photo by Emily Levine on Unsplash We had some money and we went to Rome. My husband had never been, and I’d just turned forty. It is not possible for me to write the name I called my husband. I don’t remember our endearments. My husband today—someone else—I call Sweetheart, but I didn’t use that […]