Author: <span>D. A. Hosek</span>

Live long enough, and life teaches you that God is not your lucky rabbit foot. J. Courtney Sullivan, Saints for All Occasions.

Translation is not unlike an act of channeling, you write and you do not write the words. Katie Kitamura, A Separation.

She couldn’t stop calling or writing or driving past the house. That was what it meant to love someone, right? You couldn’t leave them, even if they hated you. You could never let them go. Brit Bennett, The Mothers.

Perhaps this is the only way to grieve the big things—in snippets, pinches, little sips of sadness. Julia Álvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies.

“A Pilgrimage” is one of those stories that originated by reading off the page. In this instance it was a Mexican short story that I was reading in Spanish. I don’t remember the story details very well, other than being somewhat lost in the Spanish. As a consequence I began imagining the story that became “A […]

The light surrounded him like a halo that was too big for a saint and had to be shared by all who were near. Uwem Akpan, “Say You’re One of Them.” 

He wasn’t about to be that black guy. (You know, the one who scouts ahead and gets his ass sliced in two. Somewhere near the first ten minutes of the horror movie. Although, to be fair, moviemakers have largely stopped that practice. Now there’s usually one amiable but forgettable white person who dies first, and […]

But we, most of us, lose our sense of proportion in the presence of a nun; and George, thus exposed at short range to this bride of Christ in her uncompromising medieval habit, finds himself becoming flustered, defensive. Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man.

We knew full well that hate did not require an initial offense. Only original sin, only being born. Brenda Peynado, “The Whitest Girl.”