“I never got any help, any kind of therapy. I never told anyone.”

A traveler tries to make sense of a beautiful island with a dark past.

Changes forced by cancer put a Dominican-American man at odds with his family.

"The fever lasted two days, but it took a week before he was close to better, before he was spending more time on the couch than in bed. I was convinced that as soon as he was mobile he was going to head right back to Yarn Barn, or try to join the Marines or something. My mother feared the same. Told him every chance she got that it wasn’t going to happen. She was the tiniest person, but she posted up on him like she was Gigantor. I won’t allow it. Her eyes were shining behind her black Madres de Plaza de Mayo glasses. I won’t. Me, your mother, will not allow it."

A tale of romance gone wrong, from MacArthur Fellowship winner Junot Diaz's new collection This Is How You Lose Her.

"Alma is a Mason Gross student, one of those Sonic Youth, comic-book-reading alternatinas without whom you might never have lost your virginity. Grew up in Hoboken, part of the Latino community that got its heart burned out in the eighties, tenements turning to flame."

On Haiti and why apocalypse, by definition, must include revelation.