Family history: the phenomenon of widespread, wrongful international adoption in Guatemala, and its long shadow
From Survival Math, which will be published in March by Scribner. Jackson is an associate professor of writing at New York University and the author of The Residue Years. He…
From advertisements taken out in African-American newspapers by former slaves searching for relatives. The earliest ads appeared in 1863. Villanova University and Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Philadelphia,…
From a letter written in 1905 by Friedrich Trump, Donald Trump’s grandfather, to Luitpold, prince regent of Bavaria. Trump had been ordered to leave Bavaria for failing to complete mandatory…
I gave a talk on Virginia Woolf a few years ago. During the question-and-answer period that followed it, the subject that seemed to most interest a number of people was…
Flannery O’Connor: No children. Eudora Welty: No children. One children’s book. Katherine Anne Porter: No children, many miscarriages. Hilary Mantel, Janet Frame, Willa Cather, Jane Bowles, Patricia Highsmith, Elizabeth Bishop,…
From insults exchanged by children living in refugee camps near Luanda, Angola, between 2002 and 2003. “ ‘You Traded Your Mother for an Unripe Mango’: Playing with Insults in an…