Trauma does not recollect to us whole. Memory is already a ghost of our experience, haunting us from inside our minds and bodies. Put 10 people in a room with a blackbird for an hour and you’ll get at ...

Imagine a postcard of rural New England at the peak of fall foliage, the forest alight with color so bright your mouth waters for a stack of syrup-soaked pancakes and a mug of hot cider. That’s my ...

One of the most important things I knew about the main character of my novel, The Unsuitable, was that she was not going to be likable. She wasn’t going to be pretty or smart. She wasn’t going to make ...

Writing about pop culture and current technology is always a gamble, pitting critique of the present against longevity, a story that will still feel relevant after we’re gone. But for novelists ...

It isn’t unusual for libraries to feature prominently in novels; novelists, after all, are merely adult versions of the little people who fell in love with books at public libraries. But what of ...

There’s something particularly tantalizing about glimpsing into the world of the ultra-wealthy—the gleaming facades of their lives, their gilded social circles, and the dizzying power they wield. It’s ...

Machado and I find ourselves, appropriately enough, in a refitted Victorian in Cheyenne, Wyoming. First built as a cattle baron’s folly, then converted to a boarding house for unmarried women, it’s ...

Short stories can do things novels cannot because they’re short. They’re limber and can dart in and out of close-fitting places. They can be weird and daring in ways that novels cannot always sustain.

It’s been said many times already that the coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the dramatic economic inequality in New York City—which of course ties into deeper systemic issues around race. But to ...

Fall, the season of sweaters, pumpkin space lattes, and—of course—haunted houses. Though the Victorian clapboard house will forever remain iconic, the past few decades have broadened our scope of what ...

When I teach Carmen Maria Machado’s story “The Husband Stitch,” the first in her collection Her Body and Other Parties, to my fiction workshops, it’s unlike teaching any other story. For one thing, ...

I grew up watching fights with my father on television, and have always been drawn to the sport—its characters, its rhetoric and, later, the best writing about it by stylists like Hugh McIlvanney, who ...