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BIRDS OF SOUTHERN AFRICA

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. Soon I understood that when South Africans asked what I thought about South Africa, they expected me to make big-picture generalizations...

By Meghan Tear Plummer

SOUTHERNMOST: A NOVEL

An excerpt from Silas House’s new novel Southernmost . The rain had been falling with a pounding meanness, without ceasing for two days, and then the water rose all at once in the middle of the...

By Silas House

CHEWING ON TOOTHPICKS

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. For me, toothpicks—like Zippo lighters and typewriters and vinyl records—have always signified classic coolness. My grandfather, a Brooklyn...

By William Boyle

WHAT IT IS WE CHOOSE TO LISTEN TO AND WHAT IT DOES TO US

In Lament from Epirus , Christopher C. King finds his musical and spiritual Elysium. I call two places my home: I call my record room my home and I call Epirus my home. Where I was born and...

By Maxwell George

ON EBB AND FLOW

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. Within the span of one month, our children had stood on the front porch of the house that Martin Luther King Jr. was born in and also stood...

By Leesa Cross-Smith

HALF-CAKED

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. Speculation is delicious. Meditating on half of a cake, pondering its varieties and iterations, contemplating its value as an edible commodity and...

By Kelly Alexander

RUNNING MAKES THE LANDSCAPE STRANGE

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. I was consciously conquering trials from my personal history, reforming established truths I’d carried for years about my body’s...

By Frederick McKindra

FLIGHT RISK

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. It is easy to dismiss a person as ignorant; it is hard to recognize the ways in which I am still ignorant. My ego retaliates violently...

By Julien Baker

THE GYMNAST

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. Across two lanes of traffic—an alarmingly short distance—he executed a round-off, back handspring, and back flip. He was so high in the air I...

By Meghan Tear Plummer

CHART OF OBSESSIONS

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. For me, obsession with art is also about survival. I’m after the next thing, the next moment that will give shape or purpose to existence....

By William Boyle

NO MATTER HOW SMALL

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. I quickly identified a mockingbird in the branches above us. And it was close, low, singing and calling its tiny bird heart out. I was...

By Leesa Cross-Smith

SEVERANCE

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. Severance, Katherine Yungmee Kim’s ongoing exploration of one of the world’s most dangerous geopolitical borders, is a visual “novel” that...

By Katherine Yungmee Kim

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