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Family relationships

The Missing

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,…

The Emigrants

by Friedrich Trump,

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…

The Old Man

by David Means,

A writer remembers his father

The Mother of All Questions

by Rebecca Solnit,

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…

Notes on Some Twentieth-Century Writers

by Rivka Galchen,

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,…

Diss Placed

by Andrew M. Guest,

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…

Chore List of Champions

by Kurt Vonnegut,

From a January 26, 1947, contract between Kurt Vonnegut and his pregnant wife, Jane, to whom he had been married for sixteen months. Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield,…

Paralyzed

by Roxana Robinson,

Learning to live in polio's shadow

Mommies, you bastards

by Harper’s Staff,

Curtain calls

by Edward Hoagland,

The fever called "living" is conquered at last

The estrangement

by Jamaica Kincaid,