Solos By Genre | Ploughshares

Young and naive, Kathleen Hill moves to newly independent Nigeria with her husband to teach at Igbobi College. It is the early 1960s, and Hill is soon caught up in the swirl of the times: the legacy of colonialism, chaos back in America, and violence and racism across the globe that touch even the quiet school where she teaches English literature.

In this gripping and wide-ranging essay, Nadelson deals with his grief after the premature death of a close friend, coupled with the joy accompanying the birth of his first child. Everything he now does—from caring for his daughter to wandering the streets of his run-down neighborhood in Oregon—starts to feel like a betrayal.

“A mathematician,” G. H. Hardy wrote, “like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns." Throughout his childhood, Jim Tilley was encouraged to discover such patterns through the mathematical puzzles his father posed for him to solve. Never satisfied with ordinary solutions, his father insisted on mathematical elegance. Always more comfortable in the realm of the mind, he could never bring himself to give Tilley a hug; they'd merely shake hands on parting.

Stuck with a plane ticket to Israel bought for her by a Polish Catholic ex-boyfriend, Eileen Pollack sets out on a hectic, solitary journey around the country, cataloging the region’s rich history, natural beauty, and troubled politics, while examining her own complicated relationship to her Jewish faith and heritage. In this darkly comic, incisive, and nuanced essay, Pollack upends the reader’s expectations as well as her own.