A Slave to the Essayistic Impulse: An Interview with Angela Morales
he job of the essayist, like any storyteller,” writes Angela Morales in the introduction to her debut essay collection The Girls in My Town,…
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Desolation is KEY
The weird solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation, are the very things with which every desert wanderer eventually falls in love. You think…
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Women We Read This Week
Darcey Steinke’s “Frankenstein’s Mother” in Granta This moving essay about the writer’s relationship with her “monster” mom weaves family history with the story…
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Leave to Remain
When I was younger I used to fantasize about having a button I could press that would pause the world around me while I caught my breath, had a nap…
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Emergency Pot Cookie
If you are ever nineteen and living in San Francisco for the first time, working at your first writing job, getting paid, getting laid, carousing 24/7…
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On Reading a Killer’s Manifesto
Over Memorial Day weekend, I enjoyed an idyllic three days with friends. When they left on Tuesday, I returned to the world…
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The Tweakers or the Ghosts
You know you’re close when the fog thins out, when the dull pink behind cuts through, when the hills along the highway become vacant and brown.
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The Journey in the Song
“All I’ve got to put in a song is my own experience,” Leonard Cohen once said, speaking about the process of songwriting. But as a listener…
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Could Have Stayed On The Highway
Interstate 5 stretched out before us like a flat black stain on a dingy beige carpet. Desert, industrial orchards, slaughterhouses, gas stations…
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The Edge of Sunrise
Thea and I were still bleary-eyed when the sun began to rise behind Mount Tamalpais. The day’s first light was small and self-contained…
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The Year We Came Home
The year I moved back home to California—the year I got sick and resigned, more or less, from life altogether—I had, for the first few months, traveling dreams…
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