Curated links.

Favorite Essays I Read in the Past Two Weeks:

• If you want to know what you’re made of
• Men explain periods to me
• When innocent Black people die, I mourn the life, the potential, and the art
• What gardening offered after a son’s death

Favorite Flash Fictions I Read in the Past Two Weeks:

• In the shape of a small bird, Julia Strayer
• Wants, Grace Paley
• House of Cicadas, Gabriela Lee
• Five Things, Emily Rinkema
• Fangs, Tara Isabel Zambrano
• Flapping Wings and a Shoeless Walk, Sudha Balagopal
• What the Mouth Knows, Amina Gautier
• The Blind Man, Kate Chopin
• After After, Uyen Phuong Dang
• In the Tearoom, Tara Campbell
• In the First Draft, The Baby Dies, Lindy Biller

Favorite Short Stories I Read in the Past Two Weeks:

• Betrayed by the city that raised me, Annesha Mitha
• Space, Whether, and Why, Ted McLoof
• The Driver, Samantha Xiao Cody
• All this is yours to lose, Marcus Tan
• Room Tone, Brian Evenson

Favorite Sentence I Read in the Past Two Weeks:

“I’ll never stop hating this place, and I will never, ever leave it.” Little Fish, Big Fish, Jennifer Hudak

Favorite Paragraph I Read in the Past Two Weeks:

“The sex robot continues as if Grandma is there. At night, it sleeps on the left side of her bed, until we have her bed removed; then it sleeps on the floor where the left side of the bed used to be. Early in the morning, it wakes and makes coffee, until the coffee machine is gone. It picks out a grapefruit from the refrigerator, until there is no more grapefruit, no more refrigerator. The worse is when it sits at the table, when it cuts the grapefruit into perfect wedges, when it raises them and places them gently where Grandma’s lips used to be. Until there is no more chair.” Grandma’s Sex Robot, William Hawkins

Etcetera

• ‘America Does Not Deserve Me.’ Why Black People Are Leaving the United States.
• “I don’t have time to write about the soul. / There are bodies to count.” –a poem by Hala Alyan
• “The most difficult challenge in our lives is to face our contributions to the systems that reproduce inequality and consequential cycles of violence.” Sarah Schulman on the Hamas-Israel War.
• On learning to write in English without disappearing
• Permission to cry
• The Yellow Umbrella (a short video)