Featured Essays

Everyone Carries By Josina Guess From issue 21.2 of Fourth Genre He tucks me into bed again. “Just remember that none of it is real.”    —Julie Marie Wade, “Still Life with Guns”       I am six going on seven when my family drives across the country in our brown Volkswagen Vanagon. For a …

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Like a Shipwreck By Erica Berry From issue 21.1 of Fourth Genre, a winner of the Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize, and a notable essay in Best American Essays 2020.     In the spring of 1940, a man with a coif like a scalloped shell ordered 350 glass ampoules from a local pharmacist. He was making …

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