Fiction
The night it occurred to him he was living inside a corpse…
At thirteen, I felt my body slopping. Though I sat in the middle of the nurse’s height-weight chart, though I’d memorized the textbook diagram with its cake-like cross-section of flesh (epidermis, dermis, hypodermis stippled yellow with fat), my problem went deeper than biology.
At the appointed time, the team members left their rooms and followed Phillip’s directions. They walked down the hallway and up the stairs to a room at the end of the corridor.
“What’s a dinner party without a bit of schadenfreude?”
No one lives every day as the person they want to be. It is rare that a full hour should pass in such a feeling.
Ja’Tovia Gary & Kaitlyn Greenidge, Becca Blackwell & Okwui Okpokwasili and Deborah Eisenberg & Francine Prose
First I was Ren’s guest, a role that indicated only the short length of our acquaintance, rather than what it would become later: the strategic adherence to a balance of formality and intimacy designed to showcase only my most appealing qualities.
David Berman committed suicide, and I’m like a blackbird that has flown into a bay window and awoken in a flower box, dizzy in gardenia shade, trying to get un-stunned and back on the wing before the neighborhood cats come round.
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From personal ads compiled as narrative to a frame-by-frame retelling of a short film on grazing sheep, Nao’s poems and stories are acrobatic experiments in form.
Of all my clients, I liked Wen Changbao because he never touched me. I just listened to him. For a while I thought of myself as his dog, simply because he was my first friend.
When she was twenty, the woman didn’t think much about skydiving at all. It was an exotic concept and felt far from her life as it was, though on her walks to class she passed plenty of women her age wrapped in rigging, practicing their barrel rolls on the soccer field.
Think high-rises, gated communities, all the places that give you a twitch of existential dread. The Amazon shipping facilities, the dying superstores, the prisons and detention centers, the pig farms, all the boxes that hold products and people and animals, the LeCorbusian landscape one skirts over or through, avoids.
An excerpt from Unferths’s novel Barn 8 (Graywolf).
On writing a novel in screenplay format, the possibilities of humor, and the plurality of Asian American identity.
On writing multiple timelines, teaching with love, and creating an epic in a minimalist way.
During his twelve years in New York City, Bosun, who went by Bo, got into some bad business with an import-export company in Queens. It turned out the company was dealing in stolen goods, and Bo, who drove a truck for them, was eventually caught one winter on the bridge between Manhattan and New Jersey.
“Let him sleep. He’ll be alright if he sleeps.”
The World Doesn’t Require You, with its fabulist interrogations of American history, imagines a Maryland town founded by members of the only successful American slave revolt.