Fiction/Nonfiction: nonfiction
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Recovery from Solitary is an Illusion by Kevin Light-Roth
Simply stunning stuff. Kevin Light-Roth is incarcerated and writes about spending a long time in solitary confinement: Your mind retreats into daydreams and your daydreams grow complex and immersive. They tug you along on a course of their own devising, heeding none of your direction. Invariably, they involve conflict with someone, a real person from…
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Man Enough by Christian Escalona
A short and beautiful memoir about coming out. I’m the proud dad of a trans kid, and this one hit pretty close to home. Fifteen years since I waited nervously in a Massachusetts clinic for my first testosterone injection. Fifteen years since my voice cracked at Thanksgiving dinner prompting my mother to ask me to…
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M.A.S.H by Sarah Gerard
A memoir piece about being sexually pursued and harassed as a teenager, by an employee of her father’s. She describes the toxic masculinity of the advertising agency in the late 90s so well you can almost smell the place. At times it reminded me of Jill Ciment’s Consent: Is it scandalous or naïve to say…
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Lost in Translation by Jennifer Pinto
A half-dozen glimpses into the life of a kid growing up with a Deaf mom. This is funny, sweet and bursting with affection.
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October by Kyla Hanington
This knocked the wind out of me three times. Once when I finished reading it, again when I saw it categorized as ‘nonfiction’, and a third time when I read the author’s bio at the bottom.
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An Open Letter to the Better Robin Becker by Robin Becker
This is a fun one: a letter from the author to her more famous namesake. You teach at Penn State and I notice you’ve added your middle name to your online university bio. Does that mean you think about me? Want to distinguish yourself from me, the other Robin Becker?
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The Stranger by Robin Becker
I was halfway through reading the interview with when I realized that the original story is labelled Nonfiction. It’s a barnburner, and the tension keeps rising with every paragraph.
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Modes of Transportation
A stunning story of how music helped a journalist find her gender identity. Plus this line: I wondered what kind of person listened to R.E.M. The almost-literal truth is: nearly everyone born between the years of 1970 and 1985, at least for a little while.
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The Invisible Man
A firsthand account of homelessness in America. “Living as minimally as I know how, I’m not making it. I’m losing weight I don’t have to lose. I quit smoking and went on the patch to save money. Alcohol is the buffer a sensitive soul needs to withstand the crimes of a race—the human race—that has…
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On the Nostalgia of Dried Apricots and Other Garbage
This is a fierce piece of writing that hits like a sledgehammer: “The man I chose to wed is miles away in the next room weighing down the couch as he wrestles his way through another hangover, offering some caustic rebuke of my failures.” It reminds me of Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, but the text…