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From the very beginning, I knew that my literary novel, The Last Story of Mina Lee, would open with the protagonist, Margot, a 26-year-old woman on a road trip that ends in the discovery of a body, the body of her mother, Mina, in their Los Angeles Koreatown apartment. But what I didn’t know was that within this dual narrative that alternates between the mother’s POV in the past and the daughter’s in the present, I would be writing a story that uses elements of mystery as well — a death that might be crime, a string of clues, a red herring or two. I only realized while writing a second or third draft of my book, that a story that depends so much on the past needed forward momentum and action too, so that the past and present, like in life, would be in conversation with each other...

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday, September 18, 2020, my phone lit up. My neighbor called; my cousin; my best friend; my boss; I called my parents, because even as an adult, you need your mom to verify the incredulous. Ginsburg had been so tenacious and present in our lives that her death seemed like the loss of something elemental.

It’s unfair to make a person, no matter how brilliant or courageous, your life raft, but that is what many of us did with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her decades on the court showed us that she was deliberate, just, and future-minded, defending citizens whose constitutional personhood is somehow always in jeopardy. With Ginsburg on the bench, it seemed possible that we could ride through the oligarchic mayhem of present politics...

I distrust narratives, always have. The child too shy to open her mouth and captivate others with story became the science journalist who fetishized data instead, fond of talking about how stories can stand in the way of justice — just look at how a blond girl suddenly kidnapped can receive so much more attention and care than all the less photogenic children who live every day in difficult conditions.

The distrust has not changed. I still believe that narratives are easy to mutate and misinterpret, and that narrative is an insidious form of magic, a tool not always used for good. The difference now is that I see that narrative is all there is. All my suspicion has done little to immunize me; I am not as imaginative as I would like to believe. And I keep thinking about a minor plot point in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, how it taught me without me knowing, and how it hits differently now...

I wrote a book about chicken soup. It all started when I was super sick and traveling home from a work trip. I came home to a pot of chicken soup on my porch. My sister had left it there. I immediately ate three bowls. It was the greatest gift and made my world better that day. Inspired by that, here are six ways that chicken soup can make the world a better place.

Chicken soup heals the body.
When you are sick, when you are hungry, when you are worn out, there’s nothing like a hot bowl of chicken soup to hit the spot. Whether it is the miracle of “Jewish penicillin” or Saoto, Suriname’s hangover cure, there is something magical about eating a bowl of this sweet and salty broth. The restorative properties of chicken soup are a common thread across the world...

Join us for a virtual event with Katherine Sharp Landdeck on Friday, August 28, at 5 p.m. She'll be speaking with WASP Nell Bright in a conversation moderated by Tracy V. Wilson, cohost of Stuff You Missed in History Class.

I always wanted to fly.

I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, not far from Offutt Air Force Base and even closer to the small Millard Municipal Airport, so there were always planes flying overhead. I couldn't help but look up each time one passed by. Birds always got me, too, with their wings open wide as they soared in the wind. I envied their view from above, the sensation of freedom. I knew I wanted to fly...

Something remarkable is happening. In the chaotic churn of COVID-19, an election year, and the Black Lives Matter movement, more people than ever are buying books online from local and independent bookstores. In March, our customers amazed us with a mountain of orders, and their continued support is helping us stay open. Every day, our hearts are filled to bursting with gratitude, while our minds and bodies are occupied with getting packages out of the door as quickly as possible.

It’s this last part — moving books from here to there — that poses the biggest challenges for indie bookstores, and small businesses in general, in a pandemic economy defined by e-commerce...

When one thinks of historical fiction, one might think of the immersive experience of dropping into a different time and place replete with the sights and flavors of that world, but there are other kinds of fiction that grapple with the idea of history itself, where the details and experience can only come to the reader slivered, or shrouded, or fractured and dappled, everything, even the most intimate events, contingent on the limits of a particular perspective and, ultimately, the reticence and unreliability of human memory itself.

My paternal grandfather died three years ago, following his 100th birthday. My last remaining grandparent, he was in good health, mobile and relaxed, savoring the mundane pleasures of everyday life...

I was working on the third or fourth draft of my book, The Journeys of Trees, when a friend pointed out to me what the book is about. It came as a surprise. I was fairly certain I knew what it was about: the future of forests. Thanks to the combined effects of climate change, globalization, and deforestation, the world’s forests are in a state of upheaval unlike any since at least the end of the last ice age. In the book, I abandoned the usual view people take of trees and forests, as reliable and unchanging, nearly geologic in their stillness, and instead cast them as mobile, dynamic collections of creatures — which of course they are, if you take even a moderately long view of things. Slipping out of the usual human scale threw into higher relief what is typical about our time, and what is truly unprecedented. That’s what the book is about. But, as my friend pointed out, maybe that’s not all the book is about. Maybe, he suggested, it’s also about acceptance...

“I trust Google,” he said, completely out of the blue. He was flopped on the couch on a lazy Saturday morning, his needs-a-haircut-now bangs in his eyes, a graphic novel in his hands.

“Excuse me?”

 “I trust Google,” my 6 ½-year-old son repeated. “To tell me good and right information.”

“Well,” I replied. “Tell me more about this...”

He explained that they’d been discussing search engines in the Media Center at school, and that they’d talked about how we get information...

In the preface to her book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman writes, "I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet." She is drawn to “frictions and incongruities....Often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one."

I read these lines for the first time four years ago, as I was beginning to write my own book, Yellow Bird, and it occurred to me that I, too, had been standing at a point of tangency...