Staff Picks

Caught up in the everyday dread and surreality of life in quarantine, it can be hard to remember the beauty of our past lives or the small joys the world has to offer in the strangest, most idiosyncratic ways.

On four notable occasions, I have finished writing for the day only to find the climaxes of my stories rearing their Hydra heads in my life. This has involved tornadoes, apartment-ruining fires, and other calamitous events. So, needless to say, there are some stories that I have vowed never to write.

Porter House Review editors recommend their favorite Latinx artists, including Fernando A. Flores, Richard Rodriguez, and Valeria Luiselli.

It’s spooky season, and we made a list of our favorite haunted tales to round out the month of October.

Do you need to write with playlists thematically curated to your current work in progress, or do you consider even being aware of the existence of song lyrics while writing to be sacrilegious?

These are the pieces that guide our editorial sightlines—the writing that drives us to cultivate a unified publication seasoned with all the disparate flavors of writing we have sought out as readers ourselves. We hope you enjoy reading some of the language that has most recently nourished us.

In our new Porter House Reads series, we hope to exploit even that bit of leisure in order to have more conversations with you, the reader, about which words have most recently animated the fleeting jolt of collective aliveness that only the best writing can gift us.