As a millennial who preferred phone calls and IRL convos, I thought texting was the worst. Then I discovered the art of long-form text messages.

Sex is assumed to be an intensely private experience, but like much else, we experience one thing in relation to another. In that sense, sex is advertisement, sex is food, sex is car insurance, and mothers in Alo Yoga uniforms; sex is expensive baby strollers, and Seamless, a rat coming out of a garbage bag with a chicken bone in its mouth. Sex is subliminal. In the city, sex is ambitious, overwhelmingly so. How many times must we do it daily? Sex is competition. Sex is public.

I remember being born, the deep red rush, the slippery vessel, the convulsion of tears and sweat, of not-wanting, then suddenly—the light. I don’t remember my mother. In bringing me to life, she’d retracted inside her body, an inversed dahlia, the multiple petals folding into itself.

In this interview, Trinh explains the danger that Vietnamese bloggers face when they discuss political issues, as well as the state of free expression in the country and his honest views as to how Vietnamese activism is shaped by cultural constraints.

Oh Reader is a magazine about reading, for and by readers. It looks deep into the art of reading—why we do it, how it affects us, who we are when we read, and how we’re all connected through words.

I learned to love my father through the curvature of his absence,...as a ghost, an invention, a hearsay.

After the exhilaration of publication dissolved, I still had myself to face.

Abbigail N. Rosewood, author of If I Had Two Lives, recommends fiction from around the world about psychic splits