latest creative nonfiction
Whore of Babel
A foreign language is a perfect stand-in for a parent: stern but accomodating, solid but flexible. Immense, possibly well-travelled, with non-negotiable limitations that soothe and please as well as enrage. Apparently ageless (but certain to die). Infinitely present. Embracing. Yours.
Daughter off the Cross
Suddenly, breaking our protocol, Irene said, "I love you, dear." We both knew it wasn't me she loved, though.
Birth of the Cool
I grew up in a wealthy, Westside neighborhood and attended schools dreamt up by former hippies. The city’s racial metaphor for me felt like a pot of soup with a nice, chef salad, something casual and light and accompanied by a glass of iced tea.
My Beijing
Grandpa bought the place for cheap back in the sixties, a Communist blessing. Grandpa did good for high-ranking Reds. Black-and-white photographs of him with the Chairman hang where house guests will look.
Noise
The problem with the noise was that it silenced the silence. Now, in the spaces between sirens and garbage trucks and screams and shouts and machinery heavy and light, in those places where there should have been silence, there was only more noise.
Our Father
Entwined contemplations of author Chris Hedges (War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning) and former ad-man Bruce Bauman, and their respective relationships to this essay’s author (a ne’er-do-well novelist and ex-soldier)
When Dolls Talk
I was eighteen years old when my daughter, Belinda, was born--a kid having a kid. I didn't see myself as a kid, of course. That understanding came later.
Relations
In New York City, in the spring of 1999, a story hit the newspapers of a Long Island woman who had given birth to twins--one white and one black. The woman and her husband were white and the black baby was not theirs, at least not biologically. The embryo that became that baby had been accidentally implanted in the woman's uterus...
Melville and Bartleby: Facing the End of an Audience
The worker consents or faces death. This is Bartleby's recognition. But in consenting, ironically, he also faces death, the death of the self. It doesn't matter that the self is a fiction. In fact, the murder of the fictive self, the self that finds a place within society, that has basked in social approval, is more tortuous and painful than the death of any actual self. This is what it means to "lose face."
Hard Canvas
"What do we got today?" asks Ryan Ludwin. He's poking around inside two Styrofoam to-go plates from the chow hall. They're full of oranges, apples, and grapes. They're full of silver-dollar pancakes and small packages of syrup. They're full of bite-size breakfast sandwiches and bacon and sausage. They sit next to boxes of orange juice, grapefruit juice, and fruit punch which are all, like everything else in Iraq, covered with Arabic script.
Death Rattle
This clothing, this changing of the clothes, is not at all like Superman. Not that anyone would make such an association, but let me just say it: I can’t fly. Gravity and the second law of thermodynamics regularly have their way with me. I change into clerical garb because that is what is expected, and that’s fine. The collar will identify me and make my presence in N.’s home intelligible among people I have not met before, granting context. “The pastor’s here.” I get in my 1992 Honda Civic and go.
Bubble-gum Cameos, Pop-tab Cars, and Kansa the Buffalo
Rosie waves her newspaper at me... She’s saying, “And when we went inside the gallery in Taos—Taos is so far-out, just far-out—we said we were interested in the buffalo outside, but the owner wasn’t there so the clerk called him and Wendell heard him say, ‘There’s a couple from Kansas here who is seriously crazy.’”
No Taking Pictures
"What is this place, anyway?" I ask. My head and face have become numb. My stomach feels like it's been scalded. I spit the nut out and wipe my burning lips with the back of my hand.
Three Interlinked Selections from A Whaler’s Dictionary
At the opening of the first page, and on many a last page, an error is stamped, and the indentation of this error, filled with gold. We begin a book, and end a book, in error and mistake. The bookbinder’s whale serves not as linguistic information (it might be unfair to claim the bookbinder’s whale as any sort of information at all). It is decoration—an embossed luxury. The bookbinder’s whale is also the emblem that inaugurates the eye to the knowledge about to follow; it is also the cipher that closes knowledge shut when the experience of reading is done.
The Commute (Hoboken, 1996)
If commute you must—and hey, eight million a day do—going home nights on the PATH train from World Trade Center to Hoboken isn’t too brutal. Crowded, alright, this time of day. Packed so you can’t move, sure. But that’s New Jersey; it’s all relative.
Whale Winds
Lubec is dying. There are no fish left. The lovely old, paint-peeling houses are for sale because the fishing families can't feed their children anymore and they are leaving. The stores on Main Street are boarded up, sometimes burnt-out by desperately bored and angry teens.
Cubs Saturday, 1984
That June day more than twenty-two years ago began cloudless and hot, the Cubs and Cards, both doing all right at the time, poised to clash for short-term bragging rights in the ongoing saga of their regional rivalry.
Yellowstoned
It is 4:00 a.m. For the past hour, only the hallucinations have kept me on my toes. A horse bridled with Christmas lights appears and canters alongside the car. I have slowed to the speed of his gait; I consider his footing as we take corners.
Warbler Delight
I suppose that someday, suddenly, I will be transferred to another age, for example the chivalric or the bronze. The hope is, of course, that I arrive in period dress, but that I not resemble a contemporary luminary, for I wish to simply onlook.
Enough
Empty boxes. Banana boxes, frozen entrée boxes, Healthy Start cereal crates, waxed produce boxes. The bread boxes, usually full and available for the taking, are also empty.
Walking with an Essayist
It is gray and frigid outside. I have accomplished little at my desk. I have plans, when I return home, to draft an essay about love. So I want my walk around the lake to go quickly...But the Essayist says, Think of Brenda Ueland.
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nonfiction interviews
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editor picks: nonfiction
- Out of Eden by Alan Burdick
- A William Maxwell Portrait by Charles Baxter
- Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
- For more book recommendations, visit Book Rate and our What We're Reading blog.
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