December 25, 2019 Best of 2019 The Evil Stepmother By Sabrina Orah Mark We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Franz Juttner, Illustration from Snow White, c.1905 The stepmother swings like a light bulb back and forth, causing the mother who is not there to glow. That is her job. I am a mother, a stepmother, and a step-stepmother because I am my husband’s third wife and he has daughters from his first marriage and a daughter from his second. And I am a mother-mother to our two sons. “This isn’t one of your fairy tales,” my husband once said to me during an argument. He didn’t mean Disney, he meant Grimm. He meant I was stowing myself in the body of a fairy-tale stepmother and setting sail. When all my husband’s daughters are in our house at once, I grow very small. The weight of those girls who are not mine tilts the house and slides me toward the door. The weight of my sons slides me back in. Up and down goes this seesaw. My husband takes no turns. He grows weightless and blurry. On weekends, my seventeen-year-old stepdaughter comes out of her bedroom in the early afternoon in a thick white robe. She moves slowly, like a gathering cloud. My sons worship her. She is soft and kind, and they scramble all over her body like mice. “Play with us,” they beg. She yawns. Shuffles into the bathroom. They wait by the door. Often she is in there for a long, long time. Her name is Eve, like the first woman on earth. I love my stepdaughter, but I don’t love being a stepmother. It’s grim work. If we stood side by side, Eve and I, and looked into the mirror, it wouldn’t be our reflections staring back at us. It would be something wild and cruel. A discarded mother skin. A punishment for loving what doesn’t belong to you. Read more >>
December 25, 2019 Best of 2019 The Crane Wife By CJ Hauser We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Original illustration © Daniel Gray-Barnett Ten days after I called off my engagement I was supposed to go on a scientific expedition to study the whooping crane on the gulf coast of Texas. Surely, I will cancel this trip, I thought, as I shopped for nylon hiking pants that zipped off at the knee. Surely, a person who calls off a wedding is meant to be sitting sadly at home, reflecting on the enormity of what has transpired and not doing whatever it is I am about to be doing that requires a pair of plastic clogs with drainage holes. Surely, I thought, as I tried on a very large and floppy hat featuring a pull cord that fastened beneath my chin, it would be wrong to even be wearing a hat that looks like this when something in my life has gone so terribly wrong. Ten days earlier I had cried and I had yelled and I had packed up my dog and driven away from the upstate New York house with two willow trees I had bought with my fiancé. Ten days later and I didn’t want to do anything I was supposed to do. Read more >>
December 24, 2019 Best of 2019 Literary Paper Dolls: Franny By Julia Berick and Jenny Kroik We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! © Original illustrations by Jenny Kroik Before I was a tomboy or a clotheshorse or a loser or a teenager, I was a bookworm. In that happy valley before puberty, my greatest bliss was to be given both a book and the permission to play dress-up all at once. I had a plain white trunk for my robes and silks, my wings (several kinds), my swords and my purses. Dressing up as my favorite characters was a bit of magic, and, even today, I still read novels like a costume designer. I can tell you that the best part of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is Edna Pontellier’s peignoir. I think a lot about Moriah’s underwear in Play It As It Lays (blue silk from a hotel shop) and Hana’s sneakers in The English Patient (slightly too big). How could I not? They are the only shoes she wears. Clothing means something about our destination, our origins, our field, our desires. Everyone in a novel is dressed with intention by their author. I’ve paired with the illustrator Jenny Kroik to bring you what us bookworm-clotheshorse child-adults have always wanted: literary paper dolls. We’ve begun with J.D. Salinger’s Franny, but stay tuned for more. Print them, share them, dress them, and please, please play with them. There’s a link to your own printable paper doll at the bottom of this post. You, too, can take Franny from one edge of her breakdown to the other by taking off her smart traveling outfit and fitting her with a pale blue cashmere afghan. We who shop late nights in marketplaces online might find satisfaction in printing out a robe and pinning it literally onto not just a figurine but to a character, an author, a time period. At the very least, this will look great on your desk. Read more >>
December 24, 2019 Best of 2019 Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction By Mairead Small Staid We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Johan Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Laesende lille pige, 1900 “I read books to read myself,” Sven Birkerts wrote in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Birkerts’s book, which turns twenty-five this year, is composed of fifteen essays on reading, the self, the convergence of the two, and the ways both are threatened by the encroachment of modern technology. As the culture around him underwent the sea change of the internet’s arrival, Birkerts feared that qualities long safeguarded and elevated by print were in danger of erosion: among them privacy, the valuation of individual consciousness, and an awareness of history—not merely the facts of it, but a sense of its continuity, of our place among the centuries and cosmos. “Literature holds meaning not as a content that can be abstracted and summarized, but as experience,” he wrote. “It is a participatory arena. Through the process of reading we slip out of our customary time orientation, marked by distractedness and surficiality, into the realm of duration.” Read more >>
December 23, 2019 Best of 2019 Reimagining Masculinity By Ocean Vuong We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! “No homo,” says the boy, barely visible in the room’s fading light, as he cradles my foot in his palms. He is kneeling before me—this 6’2” JV basketball second stringer—as I sit on his bed, my feet hovering above the shag. His head is bent so that the swirl in his crown shows, the sweat in the follicles catching the autumn dusk through the window. Anything is possible, we think, with the body. But not always with language. “No homo,” he says again before wrapping the ace bandage once, twice, three times around my busted ankle, the phrase’s purpose now clear to me: a password, an incantation, a get-out-of-jail-free card, for touch. For two boys to come this close to each other in a realm ruled by the nebulous yet narrow laws of American masculinity, we needed magic. No homo. The words free him to hold my foot with the care and gentleness of a nurse, for I had sprained my ankle half an hour earlier playing manhunt in the McIntosh orchard. We ran, our bodies silver in the quickening dark, teenagers playing at war. Read more >>
December 23, 2019 Best of 2019 What Was It About Animorphs? By James Frankie Thomas We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! How do I convey the overflowing surplus of books in the nineties? They had their own aisle in every supermarket and spilled over into the checkout lane so you could impulse-buy them along with gum and nail clippers. Their pages were off-white and delicate as Pringles, their covers so shiny they were almost slimy, and they became polka-dotted by your fingerprints as soon as you touched them. They weighed, and cost, approximately nothing. What were they about? What weren’t they about? There was a tie-in novelization of every Hollywood movie, plus one tie-in novelization of a tie-in TV show of a Hollywood movie. There was an extremely pink series in which Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen solved low-stakes mysteries (fictional, presumably, though it wasn’t totally clear). There was a ubiquitous best seller that was just two hundred pages of a little boy being brutalized by his sadistic and increasingly creative mother; then there was a sequel, and another sequel. “You insatiable little book-suckers,” the publishing industry sneered, chucking chicken soup at a dozen newly identified subtypes of soul, “you’ll read anything, won’t you?” For children’s books in particular it was an era of quantity over quality, an unremitting glut. In those pre–Harry Potter days, a typical “series” meant hundreds of books churned out on a monthly basis by teams of frantic ghostwriters. You could order them by the pound. Often they came with a free bracelet or trinket, as if resorting to bribery. There were 181 Sweet Valley High books, 233 Goosebumps books, and so many Baby-Sitters Club books that their publisher, Scholastic, has never made the full number public (by my count it was at least 345 if you include all the spin-offs)—and they were all, to a certain degree, disposable crap. But then there was Animorphs. Read more >>