I’ve started thinking the worst of people. I wasn’t always like this. Can I keep doing this job? Why did I take the first one I found? Cause Mom just died and I couldn’t think straight? And minimum wage? Surely there is something better out there.
Inhabit your awareness. Breathe and scan throughout your body.(nonfiction)
You hang out on top of the three ancient towels you’ve layered on your couch and know you’ve done the automated surveys, and they improve nothing. You and your doctor have pushed pre-authorization – nothing. You’ve talked to your HR managers and you’ve written to the state’s insurance commissioner, and this has done nothing.
(nonfiction)
She poignantly asks, “In such a teeming ocean of words how could I know there was anything else to swim in?”
(reviews)
One of the essential qualities of my mind has always been an inability to distinguish between “being” and “being with.” I wanted to play with girls, and hence decided, age eight, that I wanted to be a girl. Why is it, I asked myself and the sky, as I continued down Grand Street, that the current trans debate focuses so much on trans women in sports? Rather than on, say, sports?
(nonfiction)
When I traveled to Geneva, no matter what else was on the agenda, a reservation at the Boeuf Rouge was required. I never changed my order from quenelle de brochet. I looked forward to the quenelles more than any other part of my visit; they were a reliable, savory anchor in my itinerant young life.
(nonfiction)
This week, ACM is posting book reviews every weekday.
Focused primarily on her childhood, Kercheval’s memoir is told in a series of seventeen fanciful chapters—ranging from four to twenty pages each—on subjects including her parents, her imagined worlds, her body (as well as the bodies of others), and the events, people, objects, and entities that shaped her. Shifting metaphors abound.
(reviews)
I tried to envision walking down old cobblestone streets, but my memories drowned in darkness: My brain clasped shut. The doors that were so hard to close when I was leaving twenty-two years ago were even harder to reopen now. But I had to. I had to go back and face the ghosts and the memories. Had to shine a light into all corners of the old dark closet. I was planning a trip to visit my mother in Russia, and as the trip got closer, I decided I was ready to go home. I tacked on a few days in Kharkiv.
(nonfiction/Dispatches from Ukraine)
This is piece is a part of our Palestinian Voices series, featuring work by Palestinian writers and artists, including people who are part of the Palestinian diaspora.
It’s like they learned where Gaza is or finally understood that a Gazan outside of Gaza, one that sees adulthood, is rare.
(nonfiction/Palestinian Voices)
I wish I’d thought to shove my friend L. off his drum throne, sit in his place, and try my hand at the kit. But in my defense, this was high school in the 1970s, when teenaged girls didn’t play drums.
(nonfiction)
Inside the mountain of smoke were orange, flickering circles like tornado funnels. And they were bearing south at what was clearly a tremendous speed. This was the Palisades Fire, the worst urban firestorm in a century.
(nonfiction)
