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• My Dream House Essay in English for Students

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English is one of the leading languages ​​in the world. Since English is the language of international trade, English is a basic requirement for everyone. Not only that, you can also interact with people from all over the world. Today, fluency in English is one of the basic requirements for a trouble-free life. To be perfect in any language, you must be able to write, read, and speak. These skills include understanding the grammatical aspects of English, writing letters, essays, etc.

Essay-writing is a fun activity for every kid. Kids enjoy writing essays as it gives them creative freedom and allows them to express their thoughts. Essay writing has many benefits: it improves students’ command over the language, allows them to learn sentence formation, etc. Kids can get free essays on several topics on Vedantu’s site. 

My Dream House- An Essay 

I always imagine how my future house will be. A home is a place surrounded by the people one loves. A house is not made beautiful by its furniture or decor, but by the people that live inside it. My dream house should be a house that I can share with my family when I grow old. I always dream of a wooden house in the hilly areas. My dream house should be the one facing a small river. Through the windows, I could see the sun setting and disappearing into the mountains. My dream house would have a small garden where I will grow my own vegetables and fruits. 

The house that I fancy would be considerably big with four rooms and a spacious common area. My dream house should be comfortable for my parents, grandparents and siblings. The house should be equipped with all the modern amenities. It should have a big TV with a home theatre system and a Playstation attached to it. The walls of the house will have light colours that will make it appear bright. There will be sufficient light bulbs and lamps in every room. I also dream of a chandelier in the guest room and a big sofa where everyone will sit and enjoy watching TV together. My grandparents love reading. I wish that my dream house will have a reading space with lots of books.

I have a 3-year old pet dog called Tiger. I also want to have a small yet cosy space in my house for Tiger where he can sleep and relax when he grows old. The house will have beautiful interiors and will have all the facilities like a modern kitchen, three bathrooms, a staircase leading to the terrace, ACs, etc. My dream home should be the one where we all can live happily and comfortably.  

FAQs on My Dream House Essay in English for Students

1. Why should students write essays about My Dream House?

Essay writing is loved by all ages. When writing an essay on any topic, they can describe their chain of thoughts and ideas. Children must be able to understand the importance of home. Home is a symbol of togetherness and love. Writing an essay about my dream house gives students the opportunity to express their feelings about the dream house in simple words. My dream house essay tries to introduce children to the most important aspects of a home that they can include in their essay. Everyone has their own idea of ​​the perfect home. With this article, the experts try to write what a children's dream house looks like. Writing a short essay about my dream house encourages children to gather their thoughts and develop their own ideas about the subject. It develops better language skills and increases self-confidence. Therefore, writing essays has been a part of the curriculum since the formation years of children. 

2. What is a dream house?

Home is the dream of many people because it is one of the few things that give happiness and comfort to everyone. Dream homes can have designs that vary from person to person and this has led to many beautiful dream homes. A dream home should be a place where the person finds comfort, no matter where they go, they will find peace at that one place. A dream house is a place that a person dreams and each day wishes to be in that place. There are many essays on dream homes that can easily be found on the Vedantu website for the students to refer to. 

3. Why should students be encouraged to write essays?

An essay is written to convince someone about a certain topic or just to inform the reader. In order to convince or properly inform the reader, the essay must include several elements that are important to be convincing and logical. Essay writing is a very important part of the English curriculum because it understands how to describe something in words or how to express your point of view without losing its meaning. Essays are the most important way to understand the structure of writing and present it to the reader.

4. How does Vedantu help students write essays?

Writing an essay takes a little guidance and a lot of practice. To understand this, Vedantu offers students various essays on various topics to understand the proper way to write an essay. Students can refer to these essays and reproduce them in their own style to get a better test. On the Vedantu website, there are complete guidelines on how to write an essay and its types. These tips and ample examples available on the website are the perfect guide for any student to write an essay.

5. What perspectives should students keep in mind when writing an essay entitled My Dream House?

Home is a completely safe place to live with our family. We live with our parents, grandparents, and siblings and it is a place that gives us love and warmth. In this article, we'll review the essay ook, "My Dream Home," and understand the importance of a dream home from a toddler's perspective. When I write "My Dream home", the child needs to understand the importance of the dream house in his life. In addition, children should see the house as a symbol of human togetherness, a place where everyone learns the first steps in his life.

In the Dream House

64 pages • 2 hours read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Overture-Part 1, Chapter 18

Part 1, Chapters 19-34

Part 2, Chapters 35-50

Part 2, Chapters 51-74

Part 3, Chapters 75-89

Part 3, Chapters 90-107

Part 4, Chapters 108-127

Part 5, Chapters 128-144

Key Figures

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

What narrative modes does Machado employ in In the Dream House ? How do they metaphorically represent experiences of queer abuse?

Machado opens her memoir by quoting Saidiya Hartman’s theory of archival silence to contextualize her work in queering the archive . How does Machado approach her work of queering the archive? Which chapters speak most directly to that project?

What does the Dream House represent? How is it connected with Machado’s writing philosophy?

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By Carmen Maria Machado

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The Dream House: The Complete Guide and Resource

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Our comprehensive workbook-format resource features: an extensive introduction to the novel and its author; detailed summaries of every chapter; rich literary analyses; chapter-specific short questions and stimulating enrichment tasks with rubrics; together with an extensive examination-focused essay section that includes guidelines, annotated examples and 20 challenging essay questions.

ISBN: 978-0-9947050-0-6

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In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado

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“Writing is a way to get rid of shame,” says Karl Ove Knausgaard, reflecting on why he wrote his celebrated 3,600-plus-page-long multivolume memoir, My Struggle . Indeed, autobiographical outpourings can have a cathartic effect—of cleansing—on the writer’s soul. In her 2019 memoir, In the Dream House , Carmen Maria Machado writes not only to ameliorate self-suffering but also to disabuse readers’ notions about lesbian love. This love, according to Machado, has been etherealized into an ideal attainable without “men’s accompanying bullshit.” Yet, as Machado contends, historically, lesbian love is not immune to the oppressive structures of patriarchy. It’s just as fraught and fractured as heterosexual love. Moreover—and shockingly so—queer love, like its straight counterpart, can engender intimate partner violence. In her memoir, Machado contests these notions by foregrounding her own experience of being in an abusive relationship with a woman. The lesbian domestic space in Machado’s telling is neither tranquil nor transcendental. 

However, the telling is a struggle because an aporia looms large at its center. Machado writes that she has no “language” in which to reconstruct her memory of the haunted dream house. The details of the terror are (intentionally) amorphous; the woman is described as slight and blonde; the woman’s house in Bloomington, Indiana, lacks materiality, transformed by the woman’s implausible and uncontrollable rage into a dark, gothic chamber of fear. Machado attributes her narrative predicament to an “archival silence,” a word that poignantly captures the idea that certain histories—the history of queer domestic violence being one—never enter the cultural records; at best victims of such violence find themselves telling their stories in a vacuum or, at worst, they stay silent. To make a coherent narrative in contextual “silence,” Machado invents a language and a form to make her particular history legible. 

Lacking a prefabricated house, Machado imagines an archive and dreams up an architecture in which her narrative can live, girded by literary artifacts—prologues, quotes, epigraphs, references to theories and pop culture—that lend the narrative a certain legitimacy. In other words, the introductory quotes and the subsequent epigraphs are not mere literary gloss; they are the bricks with which she lays the foundations of her narrative “home.” The resulting form is spectacular. The contents of short chapters are foreshadowed by loaded headings like “Dream House as Confession” or “Dream House as Fantasy.” The relationship between the titles and the actions contained in sections is fluid and dynamic, but the aim is razor sharp: to illuminate the complexities of queer love from shifting angles. 

In the Dream House exudes not only artistic but also political valence. At the heart of the memoir is a subtle critique of queer complicity in suppressing inconvenient truths of gay love, especially love that goes awry in the domestic space. Having fought to win the basic civil right to love and marry freely, the gay community may be loath to admit failure of their ideal, lest they be laughed at by the patriarchy against whose imperfect grain gay love often defines itself. But the theorizing notwithstanding, Machado’s memoir answers a question about lesbians unflinchingly: If you ask whether domestic violence is possible in a lesbian household, Machado’s response would be “Hell yeah!”   

Sharmila Mukherjee Bronx Community College at CUNY

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In every issue, creative nonfiction, graphic nonfiction, book reviews.

The Dream House

by Craig Higginson

The dream house literary elements, setting and context.

KwaZulu Natal Midlands; post-Apartheid South Africa; events recollected by characters in the present cover a thirty-year period.

Narrator and Point of View

The story is separated into sections seen through the perspective of multiple characters, but not told through the first-person perspective, using a narrative technique known as attached third-person point of view.

Tone and Mood

Tone: meditative, ambivalent, nostalgic, melancholy, foreboding

Mood: melancholy, nervous, suspenseful, dreamy

Protagonist and Antagonist

Protagonists: Patricia and Looksmart. Antagonist: Richard.

Major Conflict

The conflict at the heart of the novel is the death of Grace and the mystery surrounding its precise circumstances.

The revelation of the truth about the death of Grace.

Foreshadowing

1. When Richard says he was waiting for the ambulance to come because he had "two dead children for you to pick up" (8), he foreshadows the reader learning that Grace was carrying his child 2. The narrator says that if anyone had looked into Beauty's eyes, they would have seen knowledge there, "smouldering like a fire" (64), which foreshadows all of Beauty's revelations later

Understatement

1. "Dear Janet, please don't disturb Patricia with news of this event. With thanks, John" (224) is an understatement, as the "event" is his suicide, and Patricia will certainly be more than merely "disturbed" 2. Patricia's designation of herself and John Ford as "old friends" (224) is an understatement given the true nature of their relationship

1. A ticket stub to a play titled "Dream of the Dog" is an allusion to the author himself, who is the playwright of that very stage drama 2. There are numerous allusions to apartheid and post-apartheid events, issues, etc. 3. The narrator mentions the biblical curse of Eve, which is childbirth and its concomitant pains (100) 4. The "yellow ANC T-shirt" (155) Beauty gives to Richard is an allusion to the African National Congress, the organization that worked to end apartheid

See the separate "Imagery" section of this ClassicNote.

"The same silence: nothing has happened yet, even though everything has happened" (135)

Parallelism

The disagreement over the details of the fate of the fish in the recollection of the fishing trip of Looksmart and Patricia is paralleled by the ambiguity of the precise details of the death of Grace.

Metonymy and Synecdoche

Personification.

1. "But her grave had been waiting for her all week..." (5) 2. "The flyscreen creaks against her, trying to push her back into the house, and then snaps back at her as she slips out, as if now wanting to keep her away for good" (23) 3. "his hatred was his most reliable companion...[it was] more patient and subtle" (35) 4. "she is trying to maneuver herself away from the pain—but it is always there to meet her, at every turning" (52) 5. "There is a terrible silence in the room now: the silence is waiting for him to speak into it" (111)

The Dream House Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Dream House is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

The point essay argues that there is more tability to be found in the owining of the home. Give examples of chages that might ocurrió for a renter that are out of his or her control. Use the text for support.

All of the characters are, in some way, searching for a real home—for their "dream house." Even if they have a roof over their heads, it is difficult sometimes for them to feel as if they were really at home. Beauty longs for a home of her own, ...

What is your question here?

The Dreamhouse by Craig Higginson

Check out the themes page below:

https://www.gradesaver.com/the-dream-house/study-guide/themes

Study Guide for The Dream House

The Dream House study guide contains a biography of Craig Higginson, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Dream House
• The Dream House Summary
• Character List

Lesson Plan for The Dream House

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Dream House
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Dream House Bibliography

After a writer expressed sympathy for Israelis in an essay, all hell broke loose at a literary journal

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What are the limits of empathy in war?

That’s the question that Joanna Chen, a liberal writer and translator who is Jewish and lives in Israel, probed in an essay about her struggles since Oct. 7 to connect with Palestinians.

“It is not easy to tread the line of empathy, to feel passion for both sides,” she wrote in the literary journal Guernica , explaining that she briefly stopped her volunteer work driving Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals for lifesaving medical care.

“How could I continue after Hamas had massacred and kidnapped so many civilians,” she asked, noting that the dead included a fellow volunteer, a longtime peace activist named Vivian Silver. “And I admit, I was afraid for my own life.”

The essay, titled “From the Edges of a Broken World,” provoked an uproar in the activist literary world. Over the weekend, more than a dozen of the publication’s staff resigned in protest — and Guernica removed the essay from its website.

“Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it,” the magazine said in a statement . “A more fulsome explanation will follow.”

Among those who quit was the co-publisher, Madhuri Sastry, who wrote on X that the essay was “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”

Sastry also called for the resignation of the editor in chief, Jina Moore Ngarambe, a veteran foreign correspondent. Ngarambe did not respond to requests for comment.

In a statement to The Times on Tuesday, Chen said: “Removing any stories and silencing any voices is the opposite of progress and the opposite of literature.”

“Today, people are afraid to listen to voices that do not perfectly mirror their own,” she said. “But ignorance begets hatred. My essay is an opening to a dialogue that I hope will emerge when the shouting dies down.”

The retraction of the essay comes as a new generation of activists in the literary world frames the conflict in the Middle East as a black-and-white battle between two sides — oppressor and oppressed — and pressures institutions to boycott Israeli or Zionist writers.

World & Nation

U.S. college campuses have embraced the Palestinian cause like never before. The story began decades ago

The Palestinian cause — and hostility toward Israel — has shifted from the sidelines of student activism to a robust political movement at U.S. colleges.

Dec. 7, 2023

In January, protesters from Writers Against the War on Gaza disrupted a PEN America event in Los Angeles featuring actor Mayim Bialik, who supports Israel and opposes a cease-fire. Last month, the Jewish Book Council, a nonprofit that promotes Jewish writers and stories, launched an initiative for authors, publishers, agents and others to report antisemitic incidents in the world of publishing — from “getting review-bombed because their book includes Jewish content” to “threats of intimidation and violence.”

For many activists, giving voice to opposing points of view or conveying empathy for Israeli victims of Hamas amounts to both-sidesism that glosses over power imbalances. Israel says that Hamas killed about 1,200 people on Oct. 7, prompting an invasion that authorities in Gaza say has killed more than 31,000 people.

On X, Guernica’s former fiction editor, Ishita Marwah, slammed Chen’s essay as a “rank piece of genocide apologia” and condemned Guernica as “a pillar of eugenicist white colonialism masquerading as goodness.”

Grace Loh Prasad, a Taiwanese-born writer based in the Bay Area who published an excerpt of her new memoir in Guernica last week, wrote : “I am alarmed & upset that my writing has appeared alongside an essay that attempts to convey empathy for a colonizing, genocidal power.”

Hua Xi, Guernica’s former interviews editor, singled out a passage in which Chen describes a neighbor telling her she tried to calm her children who were frightened by the sound of military planes flying over their house: I tell them these are good booms.

Chen writes: “ She grimaced, and I understood the subtext, that the Israeli army was bombing Gaza.”

For Xi, quoting an Israeli calling bombs “good booms” undermines Guernica’s “premise that they are holding space for Palestinian writers.”

Rather than just disagree, these activists are calling for the silencing of voices they view as harmful.

On social media, an activist accused Chen of “both-sidesing genocide.” Another condemned Chen, who was born in Britain and moved to Israel with her parents when she was 16, as “a settler who has settler genocidal friends and raised settler genocidal children.”

‘This is not a pro-Hamas protest’: Palestinian Americans fight charges of antisemitism

The Palestinian cause has never had so much support. But some Palestinian Americans say the movement has a messaging problem.

Dec. 21, 2023

Established in 2004 amid the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Guernica was founded as an unabashedly antiwar, anti-imperialist publication, according to one of its founders, Josh Jones.

The journal took its name from a Lower East Side bar where two of the founders participated in a reading series, and Picasso’s iconic painting depicting the horror of the 1937 bombing of the Basque town in northern Spain.

Guernica’s leaders did not always agree on what it meant to be antiwar — particularly as a growing wave of pro-Palestinian activists called for not platforming pro-Israeli voices.

Sastry wrote on X that over the last few months she urged Guernica’s leaders to “commit to cultural boycotts” organized by pro-Palestinian activists. They disagreed, she wrote, telling staff in an email that “Guernica’s political projects can be found in what we publish.”

For the record:

8:23 a.m. March 13, 2024 An earlier version of this article said Madhuri Sastry flagged concerns about a Joanna Chen story published in Guernica’s “Voices on Palestine” compilation. The story was published but not included in the collection.

But Sastry did not always like what the magazine published. Even before this week, she said, she raised concerns about a previous story by Chen that was being considered for the magazine’s “Voices on Palestine” compilation. It was ultimately excluded.

At the same time, Guernica’s editors received complaints that their magazine lacked a complexity of voices and was too pro-Palestinian.

Emily Fox Kaplan, an essayist and journalist who is Jewish and has written for Guernica since 2020, wrote on X that “the only mistake Guernica made was not publishing a wide variety of voices” on the Israel-Palestinian issue “from day one.”

“The problem, when it really comes down to it, is that it presents an Israeli as human,” Kaplan wrote of Chen’s essay. “The people who are losing their minds about this want to believe that there are no civilians in Israel. They want a simple good guys/bad guys binary, and this creates cognitive dissonance.”

Other writers accused activists who attacked Chen’s essay of “bareknuckled antisemitism” and Guernica of “ taking its cue from Joe McCarthy and MAGA book burners .”

“God forbid someone might think Israelis are complex human beings, and not just demons,” said Lahav Harkov, a senior political correspondent at Jewish Insider.

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Feb. 23, 2024

Chen said in her statement to The Times that she did not realize the essay was sparking more than usual criticism until Saturday evening when a friend texted to alert her that one of the Guernica editors had resigned. She reached out to the editor in chief that evening and they spoke briefly Sunday morning.

“Since then, nothing,” she said.

“Guernica claims to be ‘a home for singular voices, incisive ideas, and critical questions’ but apparently there is no longer space in this home for a real conversation,” Chen said. “But I do not regard this as a missed opportunity: my words are being read and the door is still, in fact, open.”

Her essay, which is available on the Internet archive , Wayback Machine, offers a personal account of living in Israel before and after Oct. 7.

She wrote that she struggled to assimilate when she moved to Israel. Two years later, at 18, she chose not to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. Besides her volunteer work with Road to Recovery, which provides transportation for Palestinian children to hospitals, she describes donating blood to the people of Gaza. She also translated and edited the poems of Palestinian poets, believing their voices were “just as important” as the voices she translated from Hebrew.

After Oct. 7, Chen wrote, “I listened to interviews with survivors; I watched videos of atrocities committed by Hamas in southern Israel and reports about the rising number of innocent civilians killed in a devastated Gaza.”

She described holding a space in her mind for the victims in both Israel and Gaza: “At night, I lay in bed on my back in the dark, listening to rain against the window. I wondered if the Israeli hostages underground, the children and women, had any way of knowing the weather had turned cold, and I thought of the people of Gaza, the children and women, huddled inside tents supplied by the UN or looking for shelter.”

When a fellow volunteer expressed anger that Palestinians she had helped did not reach out after Oct. 7, Chen did not take sides.

“The Palestinians in the West Bank were struggling with their own problems: closure, the inability to work, the threat of widescale arrests being made by the Israeli army, and harassment by settlers,” she wrote. “No one was safe.”

Two weeks after Oct. 7, Chen writes, she resumed volunteering for Road to Recovery, ignoring her family’s fears for her safety, and drove a Palestinian boy and his father to an Israeli hospital. When they exited her car and the child’s father thanked her, she wrote, she wanted to tell him: “ No, thank you for trusting me with your child. Thank you for reminding me that we can still find empathy and love in this broken world.”

For activists who object to the very existence of Israel, Chen’s liberal framing — and refusal to take a stance — is inherently problematic: They say that the focus on finding empathy and love in a broken world ultimately justifies the status quo.

In her critique of the essay, April Zhu, former senior editor for interviews, wrote the essay starts “from a place that ostensibly acknowledges the ‘shared humanity’ of Palestinians and Israelis, yet fails or refuses to trace the shape of power — in this case, a violent, imperialist, colonial power — that makes the systematic and historic dehumanization of Palestinians ... a non-issue.”

Some argued that Chen’s liberal perspective was more problematic than any conservative voice.

“I find open warmongering less nauseating than this sort of self-pitying faux-bleeding heart claptrap,” wrote an independent filmmaker from L.A. “The fascist propagandist is at least honest. The liberal propagandist never shuts up about how tormented they are by the terrible *complexity* of it all. Get over yourself.”

More to Read

Letters to the Editor: ‘War is hell’ is an awful excuse to keep killing Palestinians

Feb. 29, 2024

Opinion: How the fight against antisemitism is now used to promote an ‘anti-woke’ agenda

Jan. 24, 2024

Israel’s media mostly keep Gaza’s human toll out of sight

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Literary Magazine Retracts Israeli Writer’s Essay as Staffers Quit

An Israeli writer’s essay about seeking common ground with Palestinians led to the resignation of at least 10 staff members at Guernica.

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By Marc Tracy

Guernica, a small but prestigious online literary magazine, was thrown into turmoil in recent days after publishing — and then retracting — a personal essay about coexistence and war in the Middle East by an Israeli writer, leading to multiple resignations by its volunteer staff members, who said that they objected to its publication.

In an essay titled “From the Edges of a Broken World,” Joanna Chen, a translator of Hebrew and Arabic poetry and prose, had written about her experiences trying to bridge the divide with Palestinians, including by volunteering to drive Palestinian children from the West Bank to receive care at Israeli hospitals, and how her efforts to find common ground faltered after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s subsequent attacks on Gaza.

It was replaced on Guernica’s webpage with a note, attributed to “admin,” stating: “Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it,” and promising further explanation. Since the essay was published, at least 10 members of the magazine’s all-volunteer staff have resigned, including its former co-publisher, Madhuri Sastry, who on social media wrote that the essay “attempts to soften the violence of colonialism and genocide” and called for a cultural boycott of Israeli institutions.

Chen said in an email that she believed her critics had misunderstood “the meaning of my essay, which is about holding on to empathy when there is no human decency in sight.”

“It is about the willingness to listen,” she said, “and the idea that remaining deaf to voices other than your own won’t bring the solution.”

Michael Archer, the founder of Guernica, said that the magazine would publish a response in the coming days. “The time we are taking to draft this statement reflects both our understanding of the seriousness of the concerns raised and our commitment to engaging with them meaningfully,” he wrote in a text.

The essay was published on March 4 and taken down a few days later, according to the Wayback Machine, where the first-person essay is still available in archived form.

Chen, who was born in England and moved to Israel with her family when she was 16, writes in the essay about trying to reconnect with a Palestinian friend and former colleague after the Oct. 7 attacks, and of not knowing how to respond when her friend texted back reports of Israeli attacks on a hospital complex in Gaza.

“Beyond terrible, I finally wrote, knowing our conversation was over,” Chen’s essay said. “I felt inexplicably ashamed, as if she were pointing a finger at me. I also felt stupid — this was war, and whether I liked it or not, Nuha and I were standing at opposite ends of the very bridge I hoped to cross. I had been naïve; this conflict was bigger than the both of us.”

Chen said in the email that she had worked on the essay — her second for Guernica — with the magazine’s editor in chief and publisher, Jina Moore Ngarambe. Over emails and in a one-hour phone conversation, Chen said, “I was offered the distinct impression my essay was appreciated. I was given no indication that the editorial staff was not onboard.”

She still has not heard from anyone at Guernica, she said Tuesday.

Ngarambe, who in 2017 and 2018 worked at The New York Times as its East Africa bureau chief, did not reply to requests for comment on Monday and Tuesday.

In the days following the essay’s online publication last week, several Guernica staffers announced their resignations on X, calling the essay a betrayal of the editorial principles of the magazine, a nonprofit that was founded in 2004.

April Zhu, who resigned as a senior editor, wrote that she believed the article “fails or refuses to trace the shape of power — in this case, a violent, imperialist, colonial power — that makes the systematic and historic dehumanization of Palestinians (the tacit precondition for why she may feel a need at all to affirm ‘shared humanity’) a non-issue.”

Summer Lopez, the chief of free expression programs at PEN America, the writers’ group, said that “a writer’s published work should not be yanked from circulation because it sparks public outcry or sharp disagreement.”

“The pressures on U.S. cultural institutions in this moment are immense,” Lopez said in a statement. “Those with a mission to foster discourse should do so by safeguarding the freedom to write, read, imagine and tell stories.”

In a mission statement on its website, Guernica states that it is “a home for incisive ideas and necessary questions.”

Marc Tracy is a Times reporter covering arts and culture. He is based in New York. More about Marc Tracy

Our Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War

News and Analysis

​The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire  in Gaza for the month of Ramadan, breaking a five-month impasse during which the United States vetoed several calls for ending the war.

​Witnesses have described scenes of fear and deprivation  at Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, which has been under an Israeli siege. Israel said the operation is targeting Hamas leaders.

​In Gaza, officials are struggling to count the dead because many bodies are trapped beneath rubble. The buried make up a shadow death toll in the territory.

A Power Vacuum: Since the start of the war, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has done little to address the power vacuum that would appear after Israeli forces leave Gaza. The risks of inaction are already apparent in Gaza City .

Chuck Schumer’s Speech:  Speaking to the U.S. Senate, the majority leader and highest-ranking Jewish official in the United States branded Netanyahu a major impediment to peace. In an interview, he explained why he felt obligated  to call for new leadership in Israel.

A Tough Balancing Act: Israel has been noticeably out of step with Western nations when it comes to relations with Russia since the invasion of Ukraine. That approach reflects unique security needs that have gained new relevance  since the start of the war in Gaza.

A Struggle for Life’s Basics: Most of Gaza’s population fled to the southern territory of Rafah , hoping to escape the war. As they hunt for food and shelter, a potential Israeli invasion has added to their fears.

In the Dream House

Carmen maria machado, everything you need for every book you read..

The prologue of In the Dream House explores the idea of “archival silence,” the idea that the stories of marginalized people, including queer people, are often left out of written history. Machado hopes this memoir helps more people to understand that queer relationships can also be abusive. The story regularly switches between past tense, in which Machado tells the story of her relationship with the woman in the Dream House , and present tense, in which she analyzes that story while reflecting on her life before and after it, and wishing she could warn her past self about oncoming danger.

Machado is studying creative writing at grad school in Iowa City when she meets the woman from the Dream House. She’s immediately attracted to the woman and soon learns that she’s in an open relationship. They grow closer to each other and start to have sex regularly, though the woman tells Machado that they can’t fall in love. Machado takes the woman on a road trip to Savannah over spring break, during which the woman frequently wanders off to call her girlfriend, Val . A week later, the woman tells Machado she loves her, and Machado says that she does, too.

In the present, Machado reflects on a close relationship she had with a pastor called Joel when she was a fervently Christian teenager. Machado and Joel often talked about personal subjects in Joel’s office with the doors closed, and eventually they began to meet outside of church, late at night. When Machado went to college, she kissed a boy for the first time, and when she called Joel to tell him about this, he told her she should ask for forgiveness. Machado considers the conflicting messages she received during her time in the church as a main reason for the confusion that shaped many of her romantic relationships.

Back in the past, the woman from the Dream House gets accepted into a creative writing program in Indiana. She proposes that she, Val, and Machado enter into a polyamorous relationship. Meanwhile, she becomes more aggressive, occasionally verbally abusing Machado. (In the present, Machado reflects on pop culture narratives about queer villains, proposing that queer representation should be as broad and complex as possible: queer people are not only villains, but they’re not just heroes, either.)

Machado and the woman from the Dream House go on another road trip, this time to Florida to visit the woman’s parents. On the way, they stop in D.C. and meet Machado’s college friends, some of whom treat the woman coldly. In Florida, Machado and the woman quarrel about insignificant things. At one point, Machado walks away; when the woman finds her, she grips her so tightly that it hurts. Later, they walk in on the woman’s parents fighting. The woman’s father appears to physically threaten her mother. The woman tells Machado she’s worried she might be like her father.

The woman from the Dream House tells Machado she’s broken up with Val. Machado feels like she’s won and begins to feel secure and worthy of love. But her narration switches to the present, in which she explores the many ways the Dream House seems like a haunted house. Back in the past, the woman becomes territorial, constantly pressuring Machado to prove she hasn’t had sex with various, often random people. The woman also exhibits other worrying behavior like reckless driving. One night, after almost falling asleep at the wheel (when Machado only let her drive because she intimidated her with verbal abuse), the woman seems to forget she put Machado in any danger.

Machado begins to feel constantly unwell and on the verge of tears. The woman tells her to stop singing and loves getting her to list her flaws. The woman’s obsession with winning means they’re barely able to communicate with each other. (Present-day Machado interjects to say that most forms of domestic abuse have no legal consequences.) The woman goes on a ski trip with her parents, during which she seems to break up with Machado over the phone before immediately calling back and insisting the break-up never happened.

In the present, Machado reflects on significant moments in her childhood and college years. One was when her parents unscrewed her doorknob after a fight, which meant she had no way to feel secure in her bedroom. Another was when Machado’s mother adopted a nervous, listless dog. When Machado opened the door and tried to set the dog free, it just lay down, not realizing it could leave.

Back in the past, Machado stays at the Dream House for a few weeks over Christmas, during which she goes bowling with the woman and her friends. They agree that the woman will drive home, so Machado drinks several beers before realizing that the woman is drunk. They take a cab home. The woman insults Machado incessantly for the whole journey. When they arrive home, the woman starts screaming and throwing things at Machado. Machado runs to the bathroom and locks the door. After the fight ends, the woman asks Machado why she seems upset. Another similar incident occurs a few days later, after which the woman says she doesn’t remember screaming at Machado. On her flight back to Iowa, Machado resolves to speak out about her abusive relationship, but by the time the plane lands, she’s decided to conceal the truth about the abuse.

Machado begins to obsess about stories of demonic possession and does her own research to find an explanation for her partner’s violent bouts and memory loss. In the present, she explores historical legal cases involving domestic violence between two female partners. Only in the 1980s did the courts begin to treat lesbian domestic abuse as a serious matter.

Back in the past, Machado experiences a period of creative productivity despite her declining mental health. The stories she writes are all fragmented and avoid their central issues. The woman’s abusive behavior becomes a cycle from which Machado feels she can’t escape. She starts to fantasize about dying in a freak accident.

One night, Machado sits down to watch a movie with her roommates. Tired and feeling safer and more content than she can remember feeling all year, she immediately falls asleep and wakes up at the end credits to find a number of texts and missed calls from the woman from the Dream House. When she calls back, the woman accuses her of having had sex with someone else. Frantic, Machado assures her she can prove she didn’t.

After making plans to move back to Iowa and live with Machado, the woman from the Dream House tells Machado she’s in love with someone else, but she says she and Machado can work through it. Soon after that, though, she breaks up with Machado. A few weeks later, she tells Machado she’s made a mistake, and the two get back together only to break up again. Machado calls Val and the two apologize to each other. She goes to California for a writing workshop, during which she starts to talk to Val frequently. On her drive back to Iowa, she picks Val up and they go on a scenic road trip and become romantic partners. (Eventually, Val and Machado will marry.)

When Machado tries to tell people about her abusive relationship, they often don’t believe her or try to ignore her. The woman from the Dream House keeps trying to contact her. Machado wishes she had physical proof of the abuse, though she knows that’s not something she should want. For years after their break-up, she has nightmares in which the woman follows her. Looking back from the present as she writes, she wishes she could reassure her younger self that she’d be okay.