“Say, white girl,” Liana could hear the brown-skinned girl behind her whispering in the middle of Pre-algebra. She knew she was calling for her, even though Liana wasn’t white. At the old school, everybody knew Liana’s daddy was Creole, that her mother was light-skinned black. Also, at her old school, there had . . .
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—from “REDACTED” which appears in the Summer 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 2) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.A CO[O]L CAT(My mama tells me I used numbers as decoration.) What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?Solmaz Sharif for form as tactic. Ross Gay for . . .
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III Adding to the Archive In the Alexandrov Museum, they’re getting ready for the evening’s festivities. A young woman from here who married a top chef from France and lives in Paris was passing through town yesterday evening, and she promised to help with filing the documents. She speaks French perfectly, laughing . . .
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II Betrayal of the Homeland The occasion that brings us to Alexandrov is a small event with symbolic importance. I’m accompanying a writer friend who has brought documents for the archives of the Museum of the 101st Kilometer. During the ‘80s, Jil Silberstein—who is also a poet, a lover of Russian literature, and . . .
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I A Living Culture When you move from one place to another in Russia, you travel through time as well as space. As distance from the capital increases, you soon find you’ve moved several years, or even several decades, backwards. Or so I told myself as I left Moscow—that turgid, tentacled metropolis, . . .
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“My therapist says I’m afraid of vanishing.Last week his ceiling caved in, ending our sessionin a shower of words and water.I’m serious. I’m always seriouswhen I talk about therapists and cave-ins.”–from “Flourishing” which appears in the Spring 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 1) Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve . . .
Read More[Ed. Note: Igiaba Scego first published this essay on the Tampon Tax, her most popular ever, in Italy’s Internazionale magazine on January 19, 2016. Since that time, an European Union measure against taxing femine hygiene products has been promised, and in the UK Parliament has passed legislation to eliminate their tampon VAT, due to go . . .
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“into it were pouredthe years that followedi’ll give you sugar for a good startas if you were a horse spursif earned. we still say that? treasurethe future, bedecked. we letit, i say to you: let it stick there!”–from “paper cone” which appears in the Spring 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 1) Tell . . .
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“I wish I knew the answer to the questionthe gutted, flipped-over caron Mulholland Drive is asking, or why the soundof fingers snappingfills my mouth with peanuts,the way I fill my mouth with peanuts at baseball gamesat county fairs and long shiftsat the pharmacy, when night hangsover the windowslike the kind of silk . . .
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In his debut novel, John Barth admonishes people who pause when the world presents them with coincidence: “Nature,” he observes, “seems at times fairly to club one over the head with significance.” The sun suddenly appears, to rhyme with our newfound hopes; the road to the cemetery is a one-way street. “The man. . . .
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