We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
I have a folder of her letters. It’s behind the tax returns and the manuals to DVD players long since broken. Nearly every letter Josh’s mom has ever sent me is in that folder: seventeen in all, in chronological order.
By Chase DresslerDecember 2011He ceased to see his friend Siddhartha’s face. In its stead he saw other faces, many, a long series, a flowing river of faces, hundreds, thousands, which all came and went, and yet all seemed to be there at once, which all constantly changed and became new ones, and yet were all Siddhartha.
By Hermann HesseDecember 2011Contraband cinnamon, a coupon for a free turkey, evening constitutionals
By Our ReadersOctober 2011On the day that Hot Springs, Arkansas, became an underwater city, I got up at about ten in the morning and heated some leftover spaghetti for breakfast. I was living in a furnished corner flat that rented for two hundred a month, utilities paid, above Prince Electronics and was pleased to have my own bathroom and also a small kitchen for the first time in a period of extended itinerancy.
By Poe BallantineAugust 2011When I first met Fred, I didn’t know he’d be a thorn in my side for twenty years. I didn’t know yet what Dostoyevsky had meant when he’d said, “Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” I didn’t know yet that the parts of us that are the most painful, the most difficult, the least susceptible to healing are the very parts that bind us most to others.
By Heather KingJuly 2011I was five years old the first time I saw the total interconnected harmonic clockwork of the cosmos, and it happened again when I was seven or eight, and possibly once more when I was reading the great philosophers and experimenting with hallucinogens in my late teens.
By Poe BallantineJuly 2011Long past midnight Sam parted his mosquito net. He’d been in Namibia for a month, and each night he lay awake, listening to the corrugated-metal roof ping and the cinder-block walls pop as they cooled. He couldn’t adjust to his new surroundings: the language, the climate, the rural isolation.
By Alan BarstowMay 2011My English wasn’t always this good. Once, I stood before an impatient pharmacist, touching my son’s throat and saying, “Sick,” and, “Help.” I stuttered in fear buying a bus pass or a sack of oranges. I set a microwave dinner afire on the stovetop because I couldn’t read the four sentences of instructions.
By David YostApril 2011Danny James was a short, wiry, good-natured convict with a handlebar mustache and a marine haircut. At forty-six he started losing weight and having trouble with his coordination. After a plague of tests, the doctor told him that he had Lou Gehrig’s disease and that it was terminal. He had six months to live.
By Saint James Harris WoodFebruary 2011Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today