• LIT at Large,  Past Present

    From the Walls of The New School to The MET: Revisiting Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today

    by Vicky Oliver, Nonfiction Editor

    photo by the author
    Thomas Hart Benton’s ten-panel mural, painted with egg tempera and oil glazing over Permalba on a gesso ground linen mounted to wood panels with a honeycomb interior. Originally painted in 1930-1931 for the New School, America Today now resides at the MET.

    At the New School, we write stories. Whether we are setting down our pasts or conjuring a future world or are just trying to capture what is happening right now in the present,

  • Cross-Genre,  Fiction,  Hybrid,  LIT at Large,  Poetry,  Prose,  Translation

    New! LIT Monthly Writing Prompt: April Edition

    Happy poetry month everyone!

    Here at LIT we are starting a new series of monthly writing prompts. This month’s prompt is from our nonfiction editor Vicky Oliver:

    Write about a time when you were lost and how you found your way home.

    The hero’s journey is sometimes a parable on the transformation of being: old habits and emotional reactions that are shed out of necessity as they become stumbling blocks to the journey. The old ways are replaced by new strengths or new ideas that have been germinating out of sight, waiting to come into play as fresh discoveries in a moment of crisis,

  • Hybrid,  Issue 36

    Parade

    by Tad Tuleja

    I do not often see the faces of the dead. But sometimes, in a lucid dream, they tug at my memory, reminding me of what I have gained and what I have lost. In the hour of the wolf one October morning, the chill just whisking down from Alberta to Texas, I am half awake in the darkness and watching a parade.

    I am five or six years old and sitting on the curb, just near the spot where Livingston Avenue runs into George Street. The parades come down Livingston from the high school,

  • Hybrid,  Issue 36

    Benign Madness

    by Joyce Lee

    You know the insanity has always been there, hidden within the stories, secreted from the norm.

    It’s there when, as a child, you sit by the lake with your younger cousins, weaving stories of sun fairies and shadow gnomes that dance on the wind-kissed water. They giggle and ask for more, and it’s just a story to them, but you see defined essences latent in the alternating sparkles and shadows, skimming the skin of your reality even as they skitter across the surface of the water, a refined actuality that soothes and satisfies,

  • Fiction,  Issue 36

    Watch and Wait

    image curtesy of Public Domain Review

    by Lucy McBee

    My name is Elizabeth Holmes.

    But I’m not the one you’re thinking of.

    I’m not a Stanford dropout.

    I’ve never been on the cover of Fortune.

    A former Secretary of State has never sided with me over his own grandson.

    I can’t speak Mandarin.

    I’ve only worn blood red lipstick once, to a Halloween party. I went as Elvira (and was mistaken for Morticia Addams, I suppose because I lacked the requisite cleavage),