Memoir

Radicalism Begins in the Body

Junot Díaz interviews science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany about what it means to be an aging sex radical and why he wrote the essay “Ash Wednesday.”

  • Junot Díaz
  • Samuel R. Delany

Ash Wednesday

“I’m known as a sex radical, but the fact is I felt there was a world of experience that had been slipping away.”

  • Samuel R. Delany

Introduction to Reading Other Women

Literature can be a primary engine of dialogue and empathy, but it—or rather, the reading public—is often complicit in the silencing of global women of color.

  • Rafia Zakaria

Transparents

When your father is trans, memoir is both personal and political.

  • Judith Levine

I Was Hacked by ISIS

With terrorism scares aplenty, how worried should one be?

  • Judith Levine

“We Called That Touch”

Race and the Intimate Tangle of American Experience

  • Ed Pavlić

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Speaking in Tongues

Serving time in Richmond City Jail.

  • Dave Byrne

The Jerusalem Forest

Serving in the Israeli army as a foreign volunteer.

  • J. A. Bernstein

A Matter of the Skies

More birds appear. Bending against the cold, I watch, name, and name again.

  • Dave Byrne

“The Tremendous Suffering of Ordinary People”

Barbara Rylko-Bauer’s A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps.

  • Paul Farmer

On Pablo Neruda and Autism

A conversation with Adam Feinstein.

  • Jessica Sequeira

Grieving DFW

Karen Green's Bough Down.

  • Nicole Rudick

Herta Müller’s Language of Resistance

Totalitarianism’s linguistic aggression.

  • Costica Bradatan

Light of the World

Remembering Ficre Ghebreyesus.

  • Elizabeth Alexander

Bloody Abroad

Amanda Knox finds herself.

  • Merve Emre

Praying to Allah on Bastille Day

Winner of the 2012–2013 Boston Review Essay Contest

  • Kate Korman

Thomas Goes Riding the Silver Sunset

Your seatmate from Heathrow to Copenhagen is a beautiful young Estonian woman who, thankfully, is talkative.

  • Thomas E. Kennedy

My Hungry Soul

Alfred Kazin’s raw materials.

  • Vivian Gornick

Suppose You’re an Idiot

Mark Twain tells his own story.

  • Roger Boylan

Zigzag Ice Dragon

A hike in Tibet

  • Matthew Fishbane

Man of Principle

The Passions of Arthur Koestler.

  • Roger Boylan

Wednesday Nights

A memoir.

  • Vestal McIntyre

The Collaborator

On the writings of V. S. Naipaul.

  • James Wallenstein

Love Letters

The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

  • Cecily Parks
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