Nonfiction
- “Awkwardly Dapper: The Strange Exhilaration of Buying, and Wearing, a Suit” – Meghan McCarron writing for The Toast with her typical verve and humor, on the personal identity issues brought up by working at being handsome in men’s formalwear.
- “Your Prescribing Doctor: Dispatches from the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Complex” – Rebekah Frumkin’s new column for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, about her relationship with lithium and similar substances, and how this relationship changed while she was in India. In the entire time I’ve known her, Rebekah has never written a sentence that wasn’t worth reading. This new, continuing column contains many sentences.
- “My Night With Afghanistan’s Only Female Warlord” – Jen Percy writing for New Republic, about the most terrifying sleepover I’ve ever heard of.
Fiction
- “A Dismal Paradise” – Ashley Davidson with a story in Five Chapters that really stayed with me. It’s a gorgeous, subtle look at the complicated boundaries of humanity and infirmity. This is a favorite subject of mine, and Ashley has explored it with memorable grace.
- “We Are The Cloud” – Sam Miller in Lightspeed Magazine, with a science fiction story about the exploitation of orphan children that is, by turns, tender and brutal.
- “The Glass Bottle Trick” – Nalo Hopkinson in Fantasy Magazine with a new take on the Bluebeard story. I overdosed on retold folklore a few years ago and haven’t usually been able to enjoy it since, but perhaps I’ve gotten over it, because I liked this. Bit of a linked variables problem, though; I almost always like Nalo’s work.