Maternal Archives

Maternal

Mother-Daughter Story

by Sigrid Nunez,

How to explain to her daughter. Back when she was in college, she had taken a literary seminar for which she’d had to read Kafka’s “Letter to His Father.” After…

New Books

by Dan Piepenbring,

I’m a father now. Please, hold your applause. As I write this, my son is fifteen days old, and I’m staring into the soft hurricane whorl of his hair, thinking…

A Perfect Woman

by Dorothy Dunbar Bromley,

It would be a bold writer who would attempt to have the last word on the much-debated maternal instinct. But since so many men have had their say on the…

Motherhood

by Sarah Manguso,

In the beginning, waiting for the baby to feed or stop feeding or burp or pass wind or yellow liquid shit, I postponed showers, phone calls, bowel movements. With the…