Author in Progress When Megan Tudehope decided, aged 40, to write her first novel, she started reading and watching anything and everything that might teach her how, and she noticed a common theme: people talking about how they’d wanted to be authors their whole lives, and had been writing since childhood; who had written their […]
Featured Culture
Author in Progress
The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep: Doug Cockle Gruffs It Up As Geralt Again
by Caroline Cao
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. Doug Cockle is an accomplished video game voice actor, but of all his work, he’s most famous for one gruff voice: the rugged Witcher Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher CD Projekt Red video games that act as sequels to Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher books. Although […]
MAYDAY Staff Survey: The Best Reads of 2024
by MAYDAY Staff
Murder mysteries. True crime. New works by Sally Rooney, Percival Everett, and Kristin Hannah. Romantasy, YA romance, and frankly all around too much romance to read. 2024 provided so many amazing and enticing books that there’s no way any of us could possibly read them all in one year. But just in case your to-read […]
Ladies at the Club
Yesterday at the swim club in Berkeley, two women about my age were sitting in the hot tub, giggling about adventures on beaches along the opposite coast. I joined them. When they asked about my teenage memories of the same, I hesitated. I don’t know them except as our paths cross at the pool. I […]
UNDERDOG DAYS
by Beatriz Seelaender
BREEDING MUTTS “And there is only one thing in our way and, at times, (this) invalidates our qualities. I want to allude to what I could call a ‘Mongrel Complex’. I am imagining the reader’s shock:—‘And what would that be?’ I will explain—by ‘Mongrel Complex’ I mean the position of inferiority in which Brazilians […]
Despair Descended First
by Ulysses Hill
This story is a product of the MAYDAY:Black Incubator. It doesn’t take long for a child to realize they’re poor. No longer than the moment they’re exposed to something more. I was in the fifth grade. After waiting in line for an hour at a charity event, I received just one present, an astronaut […]
A Conversation with Kalani Pickhart
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with novelist Kalani Pickhart about her debut novel I Will Die in a Foreign Land. The book provides a vivid portrait of the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine through the interconnected stories of four characters whose lives are forever changed by the events. In our wide-ranging conversation, Pickhart […]
“I Tried To Cover My Tracks.”
This story is a product of the MAYDAY:Black Incubator. “The history of publishing and the political nature of art cannot be understood without taking into account the relative powerlessness of marginalized artists who do not own the keys to social, political, and economic power. It seems we can never be given anything without a […]
Indian English
by Palak Godara
In India, my father asks me to slow down the car at the sight of a speed breaker and not a speed bump. I love the pasta Kareena Aunty makes, not the one Aunty Kareena makes. In India, when you pester someone, they’ll ask you to “not eat their head.” Your boss doesn’t pressure you […]
How to Tell a Pure Rage Story
by Matthew E. Henry
Editor’s Note: This article contains words that are racist and may be upsetting. “…if I could somehow re-create the fatal whiteness of that light…then you would believe…” Tim O’Brien, poet This is true. All of it. I was invited to read my poetry at a Christian college in the US Midwest. Someone had encountered […]
