April 8, 2025
- Emily Polk considers bees and grief
- Elif Batuman profiles Sayaka Murata
- Grace Byron interviews Andrea Long Chu
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“Say you’re the middle-aged only child of an increasingly fragile mother who can no longer chop her own firewood, lug bales of hay, or—though she is loath to admit it—even harvest the honeycomb from her hives. For the past two months, since you decided to take some time away from your entomologist husband, a full professor in the department where you are an underpaid adjunct, you’ve been living in a camping trailer on the family farm, and now your mother has found a breast lump and says it’s nothing, says she wishes she’d never mentioned it.”
“On Easter Sunday we had shepherd’s pie for supper, and I felt rather sick afterwards and went to bed early.”
“My delightful, my love, my life, I don’t understand anything: how can you not be with me? I’m so infinitely used to you that I now feel myself lost and empty: without you, my soul.”