By Aaron Calvin

Reading Assignment is a new monthly series where online editor Aaron Calvin recommends essays and fiction from around the web. If you read something you think should be shared in this series, send it in an email to aaron.calvin@snhu.edu.

“A Common Seagull: On making art and mourning” by Sheila Heti (Yale Review)
Anyone who’s encountered Sheila Heti’s work, whether through her breakthrough magnum opus How Should a Person Be? or her more recent meditations on parenting in Motherhood will recognize the easy and sharp prose at work in this essay on art and grieving. Each paragraph contains its own small revelation.

“Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts” By Anthony Veasna So (The New Yorker)
This enrapturing short story of family, heritage, and food begins with an enrapturing and perfectly place-setting opening sentence: “The first night the man orders an apple fritter, it is three in the morning, the street lamp is broken, and the nightly fog obscures the waterfront’s run-down buildings, except for Chuck’s Donuts, with its cool fluorescent glow.”

“Serfs of Academe” by Charles Petersen (The New York Review of Books)
In a rollicking survey of 11 books that try to address the never-ending conveyor belt of adjunct suffering, Charles Petersen paints an eloquently brutal picture of the growing underclass of precarious academics. It’s a must-read for anyone who has felt the pain of trying to put their advanced degree to work in an academic setting.

Poem for March: “Sooner Mended” by John Ashbery

This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.
Alas, the summer’s energy wanes quickly,
A moment and it is gone. And no longer
May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are.