I recently found a scorpion on my father’s desk, which I have since stolen. Not a live creature, but a specimen, long pickled in formaldehyde. The handwritten label inside the jar reads: Paruroctonus silvestrii: Las Estacas, Mexico—1971. The scorpion floats in suspended animation, trapped in the jar I now balance on the flat of my […]
[hear the author read this piece by clicking this link.] Of all natural disasters, landslides are more devastating than most people realize. Worse, they are often triggered by other natural disasters, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Scientists refer to this as the multi-hazard effect. In one of the deadliest landslides of the last […]
Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. —Judith Butler, Undoing Gender Part One When I was in my twenties, I had a friend who was overweight. He wasn’t, as we say now, morbidly obese, and he didn’t look like those people wearing Bermuda shorts and flip-flops […]
Three murders, two lynchings, a history of racial violence, and very little sense. Thankfully we have a writer like Hollars, a Tuscaloosa native, willing to brave these maddening depths, to relive his home state’s darkest nightmares, and, against all odds, combat illogic with a rational, literary consciousness.
Featured nonfiction from the Fall/Winter 2011 issue.
Featured nonfiction from the Summer 2011 issue.
David Brooks’s The Social Animal is not a novel, though if it were released as one by a small press it would be spared the indignity of being released under the near-pejorative banner of “pop sociology.”
Featured nonfiction from the Spring 2011 issue.
Ira Sukrungruang’s memoir Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy is a work firmly cemented in the in-between. This first-person account of Sukrungruang’s “adventures” as a Thai-American coming of age in the suburbs of Chicago offers ample opportunity for cultural comparison, a subject fully explored through the retrospective lens of a child version of the author.
Featured nonfiction from the Fall 2010 issue.