My parents were scheduled to divorce on Valentine’s Day. I was there in the beginning, sat next to my grandmother, in her teal blue dress and hot combed strands. As a rule, she refused to appear unrefined. In a warm church in Trinidad, a wedding even

This month, Guernica looks at what we want — who we want — and how on earth, or anywhere else, we can possibly survive our own wanting. We lead our June issue with a diptych on desire and the divine. MM Gindi and Enzo Escober, coming of age as queer

A childless dressmaker must rescue her young niece from an unwanted pregnancy. The family crisis exposes the calcified contours of a sisterhood in which one sister benefits to the other’s detriment. Written by Ukamaka Olisakwe and appearing first in

The first of Horvath’s neighbors moved away in late winter. This neighbor, an older man with an unclean white beard, gave no warning. Horvath discovered his leaving by chance, when he noticed that the old man’s door was hanging open. Entering the apa

Spring blossoms have been at the center of this Himalayan village's spiritual life. What happens when they arrive too early?

The celebrated novelist on how he makes character, how he writes scenes, and how he opened up his most recent novel by simply not writing at all.

The white, burnished body of St. Sebastian, bound to a tree and riddled with arrows. He was startling to look at: sinewy, tightly coiled, naked save for a loincloth knotted loosely about his waist. His head was thrown back in agony, or his head was t

As a young boy growing up in Los Angeles, I am entered by The Exorcist late one night after all the adults in the house have fallen asleep. I watch the film kneeling on the thick, red carpet, my face inches from the screen: the screaming girl and dyi

While I wish to remain unidentified, I’m also aghast that Lor doesn’t recognize me. My most authentic self is Convoluted Paradox.

Ye-suh lay awash in the lime glow of her cat-shaped night-light, waiting. “Mom, story,” she ordered me. “Story, please.” “Normal story?” “Scary story.” Ye-suh had inherited my penchant for horror. We supped on grim tales, spun golden fear out of stra

Your novel is for refugees like us, people who move forward because we have nowhere else to go.

Every day, the water in Okinawa is becoming more and more contaminated. I don't know where to run to.

A. Kristy posted a video with her daughter. Four-year-old Emmie was reading aloud as her mother wrote on a small chalkboard. Kristy put her finger to her mouth, pondered, and wrote kind. Emmie read it. “Good!” Kristy exclaimed. “Now — ” She erased ki

“We’re trained to shop for motherhood — to buy things to mold our own maternal identities according to someone else’s standards.”

Our May issue, with Rafael Frumkin, Sena Moon, Sara Petersen, Yoko Uema, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tuệ Sỹ, and more

I have a doppelgänger who’s also a ghost. Once, I went where she went, did what she did, but she and I have since parted ways. Now she’s a diaphanous specter. I’m flesh and blood. Rebekah Frumkin was an exposed nerve — vulnerable and insecure, anxiet

One morning last July, I had crossed the low trickle of Troublesome Creek on a pedestrian bridge that is the symbol of the Hindman Settlement School, an institution focused on preserving mountain heritage in Hindman, Kentucky. The day was sunny; the

The expanding ice has its own language. It sounds like a sea creature, warbling and reverberating with an otherworldly howl. The first time I heard it in 2017, I thought, Oh no, this is it; I checked my feet to make sure I was still standing on somet

Sanctions aim to hit a space where the enemy-state is weakened but the people of the nation remain unscathed. No such space exists.

Guernica goes monthly — with a new photography series about climate change, the latest Back Draft, and a genre-bending work of nonfiction as resistance from Iran.

Even through my tears, I was dazzled and slightly cowed by Juniper’s presence, by her deliberate way of talking.

name (noun): 1 a: a word or phrase that constitutes the distinctive designation of a person or thing Say my name, say my name suggests movement. Say my name, say my name a summon. Say. If you call me everything to get my affections, my response to y

گفته می شود که تحریم‌ها فقط نقطه‌ای را هدف قرار می‌گیرند که وضعیت دشمن را تضعیف کند، بی‌اینکه سرسوزنی بر مردم اثر بگذارد. ولی چنین نقطه‌ای اصلاً وجود خارجی ندارد

Everything is in shambles. I try to fit the rusty old key into the lock, and it sticks when I turn it. I worry the door won’t open. The key slips from my sweaty, shaking hand. Chips of brown paint and dusty strings of spiderweb cling to my blouse. A

Under a month-long lockdown in Kashmir, the streets are deserted, the stone-throwing protesters are locked away in their homes, and winter is settling on the valley. In a dialogue with himself, an aging artist creates the illusion of company while he

When his first child was born, Anjan Sundaram was torn between the new world of fatherhood and the old world of work — more specifically, conflict journalism. As his wife nursed their daughter, Sundaram pored through research about the Central Africa

“Crisis isn’t triggered the minute somebody crosses a border; it’s triggered because it’s happening to them right now.”

Finally at the gallery, the couple (all fiction of them), / she in that white bustier, he with the cutout

Every book consists of a kind of migration. It begins in one place and ends in another. Prior to publication, it also undergoes a journey of revision: the text must travel from its initial form to its finished state. Javier Zamora’s memoir, Solito, t

I heard high sounds bet­ter than low ones. If this condition was progressive, I would prob­ably lose them all.