Growing up as a Javanese daughter, there was one word that was drilled deep into my head by my mother: malu, which means “shame.” I had a huge list of things that I shouldn’t do or say because they ...

From one girl’s aspiration to Olympic gymnastics glory, to a boy’s stint living in the Idaho wilderness in hopes of fixing his unruly behavior, something that remains a guiding principle in Black ...

What defines the strongest fictional characters? The most intriguing ones are often developed, revealed or transformed based on their wishes and desires; in other words, what they crave. The more ...

Cultural alienation is the feeling of being disconnected or estranged from one’s own culture or the culture in which one lives. While these stories traverse continents and cultures painting vivid ...

When we think of a family business, what springs to mind first is probably a straightforward, even heteronormative, structure: a commercial concern (hardware store; funeral home; shipping firm) ...

We have entered a period of spectacular bowing and scraping, in which White House staff compete publicly in stroking the ego of their flattery-addicted boss. Sucking-up takes a variety of forms, from ...

It begins with a desire to escape. Travel is an elixir, Shirley Hazzard wrote, a talisman. And what is the act of opening a book, if not an act of travel, of transportation? If not, something ...

The mother and son relationship is complex—fraught with pain, hurt, love and triumph. In my debut novel, No Heaven For Good Boys, the protagonist’s mother, Maimouna, loves all of her children—but when ...

For many writers right now, the hardest question isn’t how to respond to the world, but how to keep writing at all without losing the joy that made the work possible. The pressure to address crisis—to ...

I suppose walking out in the midst of an argument is not a mature option. But walking out, leaving, even disappearing in order to carve out some sense of freedom? That, I believe, is an act of power ...

The first piece of information you learn about someone is usually their name; it feels like a step towards learning who they are, even though it often doesn’t reveal much about them. In real life, ...

When I was a young adjunct, I bonded with a student in my class over our shared experiences of grief. A decade separated us in age, but we seemed to understand each other by the timeline of our lives.