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 Two women share a hospital room, separated by a green-blue curtain, at the end of a brief, beige hallway. Their prospects foreclosed by illness, the women have agreed to enter this room, if not to share it, and to find what peace is...

Is Mount Everest the tallest mountain on Earth? It would certainly seem to qualify. Chinese geographers tell us that it measures 29,017 feet, while Nepali geographers make it a skosh short of 29,029 feet. The National Geographic Society...

Suppose we were there for some event 

we did not want in on or did. Faith flung 

so hard, the cage I felt around me was 

no cage, just fear, in a summer-long wither; 

Can a nationalist movement from the internet save the world’s most scattered people? 

Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami’s fourteenth novel and nineteenth book of fiction, begins with a “faceless man” who appears to the unnamed narrator as he wakes from a nap, asking for his portrait to be drawn. When he vanishes, the...

I put a poem

in your backup jewelry box,

the one you keep

at the bottom of the taxes from 2003

in order to foil the inevitable burglars,

In the house there were always two 

white deep freezers packed pretty 

decent with red meat. Deer season, 

I had traveled up the Hudson Line at my friend’s invitation to deliver a lecture to his literature students at the college where he taught. There had been three people in attendance and one had fallen asleep halfway through. My friend had...

I’m without body but forming in the latticework 

of blood cell and fret. Each threat pulls me upward

tempting and building me until my spine lifts into a column,

When Marlon James announced his follow-up to his Booker-Prize winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, it was met with intense excitement. James is best known as a literary novelist with a reputation for not mincing his words in...