Francisco goldman – monkey boy

The action of the novel takes place over a long weekend in the mid-2000s, as the middle-aged Goldberg travels up to Boston to visit his declining mother, meets other characters from his past, and reminisces along the way. His current preoccupations – his career and several recent failed romances – are set against the legacy […]

Evan osnos – wildland

Many Americans know exactly how their society ended up in its current state of dysfunction and division: it’s all thanks to the Other Party, and the irresponsibility or evil of its politicians and voters. But there are also those with no clear theory of what went wrong. Many middle-aged political moderates, for instance, spent the […]

Jon SoPEL – Unpresidented

What is the point, really, in 2021, of a British journalist in the United States? With no language barrier to straddle, and all the cultural cross-pollination of the internet – including easy access to the work of the US’s own, better-funded and more knowledgeable journalists – what can these interlopers add to the picture? Perhaps […]

Sarah Broom – The Yellow House

Sarah M. Broom’s grandmother, known as Lolo, was born in 1915 or 1916, in a village founded by freed slaves on a bend of the Mississippi River. In the 1880s, a single family had built “a self-sufficient community composed of four dirt streets, named in the order in which they appeared: First, Second, Third, Fourth”, […]

Anthony McCann – Shadowlands

It began with a spectacular victory. In April 2014 several hundred protestors gathered in a desert wash between two highway overpasses near the town of Bunkerville, Nevada, and found that they were able to exert their will directly upon the United States government. They confronted a team of federal agents from the Department of the […]

Ghosts at the Riverbank

Outside Vicksburg, Mississippi, but just over the river on the Louisiana side, is a dive bar in a shack with LOTTO written on its sloping roof – in the middle of some fields, unreasonably close to some railway tracks, and not far from a levee where alligators were at the time of my visit beginning to emerge from hibernation […]

Dems in Vegas

Nevada is the least talked about and least visited of the early states, despite being the biggest general-election battleground, and the most ethnically diverse. The reason for this seems to be that Nevada is so dominated by Las Vegas, and the wider American public simply doesn’t consider Las Vegas to be a real place […]

Fernanda Melchor – Hurricane Season

In 1950 Octavio Paz wrote about “a magical word” with “innumerable meanings” in Mexican culture. This was chingar, for which the English verb “to fuck” provides a dull shadow of a translation. “Who is the Chingada [the fucked one]?” Paz asked rhetorically. “Above all, she is the Mother.” Carlos Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) contains a long […]

Tony Horwitz – Spying on The South

In the early 1850s, as America slid towards civil war, a young reporter for what was then the New-York Daily Times journeyed through the slave states. He hoped to gain a “reliable understanding of the sentiments and hopes & fears” among their people, and “promote the mutual acquaintance of the North and South”. What he saw of […]

Dangerous Animals

One day in September last year, John Kartsounis was gazing down from a plane window at Cape Cod, the sandy peninsula that juts from the state of Massachusetts into the North Atlantic in the shape of a clenched arm. It was a clear day, and he thought he could make out the public beach where […]