When I was a young child, I would spend my Summers with my grandfather at his hand-built cabin along the Youghiogheny River. He was an avid storyteller and spoke them as if they were spells that had the power to draw, captivate, and bind all who listened (which was eve...

The feeder stood silent against the waning sunshine, as the tendrils of night, waiting their turn in the yard, began to creep along within the shadows of the oak trees. Dusk was beginning to settle, slow and serene as a silent fog. Suddenly, a flurry of movement from a...

I’m sitting on a train. It is quiet. I sit alone holding a grey book, at one end of an empty car. The world around this miniscule, individual world in which I sit is moving quickly, chugging by, spinning round, wearing us down. Is the train moving, or is the earth? Is...

Spirited was one word for it—for Mama. For when I’d have to try talking her off of the moon, for when she’d crash back down to bed for weeks on end...

How much do you know about Somalia?

The extent of information I possess about Somalia is that it’s a country in Africa, and there are often pirates off its coast. I also know it has the longest coastline on Africa’s mainland, but only thanks to Wikipedia.

Abdi Nor Iftin...

Jessica Handler, author of newly released The Magnetic Girl, said she’s always narrated her life, whether through journals she writes in extensively or the very involved and informative letters she used to write her friends when they were away at summer camp. Her first...

           Before I was in college, before I learned the difference between gin and genever, before I learned that wine coolers weren’t really filled with wine, before I learned that drinking was what the cool high school kids did, I learned that drinking was something...

The attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 was, essentially, our generation’s Pearl Harbor. If it happened during your lifetime, you can remember exactly where you were when you heard the news; many of us watched it happen on television and can remember see...

"I became God just this morning."