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22 Books That Helped Me Write the Story of My Transition
As a trans person, I spent most of my life with my head in a book imagining other lives, other bodies, and other histories. In some ways, my memoir is an amalgamation of all the books that kept me...
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5 Audiobook Essay Collections Ideally Suited to Your Quarantine Walks
As a verb, one definition of essay is to try. As horrible as 2020 was, let’s pretend it means to try again. Audiobooks of self-contained pieces between twenty and sixty minutes seem perfectly suited...
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Flight Patterns: Reading of the Creatures of the Air
Cover illustration by Fumi Mini Nakamura After our sixth miscarriage, my partner, Louisa, and I, traveled to South Africa, Louisa’s home country, to conduct a funeral ceremony of sorts at the Big Hole...
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10 writers we’d like to see as politicians.
On this day in 1945, ardent lover of the working class man (and woman, of all classes) Pablo Neruda was elected as a communist senator for the northern Chilean provinces. Neruda, long an admirer of...
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Humanizing Black Bodies: Examining Neocolonialism in Everyday Life
Many may feel that using the term “Black bodies” is dehumanizing. But I use “body” rather than “person” for more than one reason. First, it emphasizes the fact that we are racialized as Black because...
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After How to with John Wilson, Will More Filmmakers Use the Tools of Lyric...
In a recent episode of HBO’s How to with John Wilson, the eponymous narrator recounts a painful middle-school experience. Time and again, his friends refused to play Dungeons & Dragons with him,...
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Power That Creates Ideal Futures and Shapes Current Realities: A Reading List...
When I moved to South Africa, in 2019, what people told me over and over—the ultimate upshot to so many different stories—was that things hadn’t turned out as they’d imagined. How relatable is that?...
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Back to School for Everyone: Writers and the World with Viet Thanh Nguyen
I taught this class for undergraduates interested in editing and publishing; it’s the only class in their curriculum that is also a writing workshop. I’m suspicious of teaching writing as art for art’s...
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Rabih Alameddine Recommends the Best (Short) Books He Read in 2022
Anyone who has read one of the earlier entries in my annual end-of-year lists knows how much I dislike end-of-year lists. Every year, the evil editor (EE) blackmails innocent me (IM) into writing one....
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New Ways to Workshop: A Reading List to Inspire Literary Innovation
In 2016, I was no longer interested in teaching the traditional workshop and felt that my students no longer wanted it. A poet mentioned that in their workshop, they read the poem on the spot and then...
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