Photos courtesy of the author“Ruins give us this beautiful idea,” writes the author, “that you could make something, something wonderful and strange, as pleasing as you could, imbuing it with somethin…
Creative Nonfiction
Photo courtesy of Ksenia Emelianchik / UnsplashFranco’s legacy falls across a celebration of two friends’ birthdays but fails to stifle the hard-earned, uncontainable, savored joy. Up four flights of…
Photos by Daniel Lincoln and Debby Hudson / UnsplashThe Georgian Sketchbook is both a poet’s diary and a chronicle of a Russian war exile in Georgia. Irina Lewinsky, an executive member of the Saint P…
Looking for relief and new possibilities, a lecturer at the University of Ibadan travels to Cape Town, but the route is anything but direct. By 1999 the massive exodus out of Nigeria had attained a cr…
Earlier today, as our car was on queue along the Saudi–Bahrain causeway, he turned down the stereo volume for a moment. “What will happen to this Filipini?” The Mary Jane Veloso trial was broadcasted…
Cairo Al-Rifa'i Mosque | Photo by Mohammed Moussa | CC BY-SA 3.0 An Iranian woman living in the US seeks to understand the meaning of home on a journey to Egypt to visit the burial place of Moham…
Interior of Arbatskaya subway station in Moscow, Russia A woman sweeping the Moscow metro with a twig broom, a violinist playing a Beatles tune, and Chekhov: Philip Metres reflects on his time on…
Translator’s note: The following text by Lin Yi-Han, like her novel Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise, is based on the theme of what it’s like to dwell in a body that carries traum…
What Is Lost Can you picture the Argentine pampa? Flat fields, eucalyptus trees, a seemingly inoffensive landscape where a gray sunset might use your boiling blood to paint a path st…
Transfer of Saint Remi relics, stained glass window in the Basilica of Saint Clotilde in Paris, France Named after a medieval French bishop, a transgender poet and essayist reflects on the inheri…
Photo courtesy of the author. for Juan José Hurtado, in memoriam For the narrator of the following crónica, 16mm films made by Kaqchikel villagers, flying ants, and dragonflies all flick…
Gloria Blizzard and Jazz, Lake Ontario, Canada | Photo by Heidi Seirekidis This essay takes the form of a jazz standard. Nestled within the intro and outro are alternating A and B sections. I am…
Photo by by Elena Croitoru A countryside flâneuse in search of her deceased grandfather contemplates anchoring, wandering, and the small marks we leave on the world. How does one get to know…
Photo provided by Nina Kossman A family’s history, Soviet history, and the role of a father’s stamp collection. Do you see this little metal box? It was surely unusual for its time—just look…
“Demeter and Persephone Terracotta Myrina 100 BCE” by mharrsch is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 A car racing down an empty steppe highway frames this essay from Kazakhstan today, as a mother pon…
Illustration by Avery Holmes “Bakery Scent is a complex that cannot be dismantled or piecemealed,” yet the author still searches for that perfect madeleine, especially the one that can no longer…
Photo by Krisztian Matyas / Unsplash “Awl” is from a series titled “Words I Did Not Understand.” Through memory—“the first screen of nostalgia”—and language, a writer pieces together her story of…
Photo: José Pablo Iglesias / Unsplash A girl learns her first lessons about cheating and death at her grandparents’ house, playing cards and Scrabble and listening to them read from the obituari…
Photo: Luiz Guimaraes / Unsplash Follow a writer-flâneuse on a New York City odyssey, appreciating life’s smaller miracles in a city with many entry points. West 32nd / Broadway. The hotel d…
PHOTO: Larah Vidotto In this piece of flash memoir, a writer reflects on stereotypes, how Ireland has changed, and an aunt stuck in time. Dear foreigner, tell me again how it is stereotype w…
Left: Kevin Chang and his brother Eliot at Brookfield Zoo in Chicago (2001). Right: The author's mother at Xitou National Park in Taiwan (1989). Courtesy of the aut…
Iron, Uranium, Calcium, Gold, Praseodymium, Rubidium, Stontium, and Lead books. Illustration by Shayna Pond {CR} Chromium books that are all shiny surface.…
Photo: Pixabay These two short meditations by Mexican writer Fabio Morábito both circle back to the same place: language’s confounding determination to elude our dominion.…
Photos (left to right): Chris Davies, Eliza Bacani, Laura Gilmore These brief pieces form a meditation on our threshold for violences, great and small. They probe the ironic relationship…
Photo: Maria Teresa Bologna Wang Anyi traces Shanghai in map and memory as she revisits its lanes, a mental flâneur. For almost the entire decade of the 1990s, I…