Fiction/Nonfiction: nonfiction

  • Contra by Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo

    This is kind of a story about deer contraception, but there’s a whole lot more to it than that. Gelfman-Randazzo uses a weird bit of local lore to tell a much more personal story. A deer stares into the camera. An ear-sized tag dangles from her lobe, like the world’s biggest cartilage piercing. It’s dusk.…

  • This Is the Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn’t Write by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

    This is a long read, but I could not put it down once I started. It’s funny, tearjerking, and lovely. In my most bitter moments, in times when I realize how much of my foundational education was given over to the war and how little was given over to, say, gym or art or the…

  • Purgatory in Two Parts by Elizabeth Jannuzzi

    This is about suicide, so if that’s something you avoid, skip this. Jannuzzi’s sister took her own life, and Jannuzzi writes about it. It has haunted me for days. I started going to church again after my sister Julia attempted suicide and failed. If my parents were surprised by my sudden reappearance in the back…

  • The Way Seahorses Hang On by Anne Panning

    From the first sentence this feels like an instant classic piece of writing, and the writing is just filled with visual language and thought-provoking metaphor. This story has come back to me almost daily for a week. Rain gush-pummels our car. Whippet wipers slash frantically at the whitecaps. Off to Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, to watch…

  • The Mirror Operator by Sarah Mullens

    This is Mullens’ memoir of the rocky relationship with her right-wing-conspiracy-theorist mother using logical proofs as a narrative device. It’s written in a way that reminded me of the Ted Chiang story I recently reread for my Personal Anthology. In bed, lights off in the middle of the day, laptop balanced on my knees, I…

  • On Aging and Dying in Captivity by Kevin Light-Roth

    Blog fave Kevin Light-Roth (read his story Zen here) has a piece in Inquest about, well, what it says up there. It’s reflective and grim, hopeful and insightful. Essential reading. This year I passed a grim milestone: I’ve now been in captivity longer than I’d been alive when I was arrested.

  • Snapshot of a Self by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

    I have a loved one that’s been transitioning in fits and starts for a long time, and this story really struck a chord with me. The last line is a doozy. After you stepped over a threshold on the other side of the world, triggering the ding of the barber’s unseen bell. After you watched…

  • What the Dead Leave Behind by Emily Austin

    I just finished reading Austin’s novel Interesting Facts About Space, and on her website she links to this essay about home and personal identity. It’s lovely: There is a truth to life that is difficult to access if you are not grieving or depressed. If you find you have looked behind the curtain and seen…

  • Women’s Hospital by Anne P. Beatty

    I love the metaphor in Beatty’s story, and . I wasn’t the one doing the work when my kid was born, but so much of the description in Beatty’s story brought me right back to that day. In birth the only plan is life, and—you realize this in the moment, or at least I did—the…

  • When the Tearing Comes, If It Comes by Abby Manzella

    Manzella writes about being at high risk for a retinal detachment, and the weak reassurances from the medical experts: Another doctor tells me, without looking into my eyes or through them, that such darknesses are common. You’ll get used to them. As she speaks, an amoeba floats from my nose and through the air. When I blink,…