The following coming-of-age novels by African women authors are shaped by an understanding of the deep and complex relationships between women. In these works, the individual path of the traditional ...

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, ...

In Late to the Party, we ask writers to read a seminal author who has somehow passed them by. You can read previous entries here. When I began working as a bookseller almost two and a half years ago, ...

What is a family? As a child, answering that question felt like the easiest thing in the world. I was still blissfully oblivious, then, to the complexities of family life. The varying configurations, ...

Growing up, book banning and burning held a strange place in my consciousness. They were part of a distant reality: a relic of the past to learn about in textbooks and a horror of alternate realities ...

One of the things I try to drive home in my book, How to Raise a Feminist Son: Motherhood, Masculinity, and the Making of My Family, is the value of failure. Of slipping up, recovering, and ...

2025 has been a year of contradictions: hyperconnectivity and loneliness, political theater and private reckoning, a collective desire to scream without forgetting how to whisper. Each collection on ...

The ’90s are back, as if they could ever truly peace out. Between Fear Street and Captain Marvel and the Alanis Morissette musical, the last mostly-offline decade is getting a gargantuan nostalgia ...

Yet those same books would have had me believe that black people had never been on the giving or receiving end of the kind of love that cuts two souls from the same cloth. Love might be universal, ...

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 ...

More than two weeks into self-isolation, I am starting to wonder whether I will ever be able to come out. I don’t mean whether I’ll be legally allowed to come out—I wonder who the person that comes ...

First published in 1979, Rosalind Belben’s Dreaming of Dead People is a seductively strange novel, leap-frogging between folkloric pageantry and the disappointments of real life. Lavinia, its narrator ...