Fiction
When she told N she was leaving, his response was that doing so would ruin him—financially.
It was nearly winter, according to the sun and shadows and temperature’s plummet, when the poor girl lost her job at a greenhouse for the misdemeanor of pocketing rare plants.
“Nothing you will see tonight is normal,” said Elihu’s mother. It was the first exciting thing she’d ever said.
Fabulism and absurdity from an under-appreciated Italian master.
I meet the artist, who does x, for a snack one afternoon. We have the kind of conversation it was more necessary to have previous to the existence of the Internet. We exchange general info about the world.
I was the type of man who got his ears cleaned. I was the type of woman who didn’t like dogs. We lived together in a house on a street that was the color of asphalt. I told you what I thought of you.
Passion overwhelms comprehension. Comprehension kills passion.
A posthumous collection cements the author’s reputation as a master of the short story.
When I was thirteen, two missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came to the house to follow up on a conversation from the week before with my mother.
Finally back in the fold of Hollywood—one imagines him advancing mistrustfully, mistrustfully looking up at the high and useless palm trees (an immoderation which serves no purpose: the palm trees “planted on both sides of the expressway in order to purge an already pure sky”).
The playwright discusses his formative years, rejuvenation of historical material, and how race is coded into theatergoing itself.
You are on a sidewalk packed and fierce and fueled by desire greed ambition come on come on miracle.
The professor reads the submissions with his hand cradling his sparrow and when he reaches hers, he masturbates profusely, rubbing his sparrow’s feathers until it is nearly bald.
I say something about the time and he replies, “I cannot sleep in this lifeless room, I can’t, I can’t. I won’t. You can’t make me.”
Congratulations to Ward on winning the 2017 National Book Award for Sing, Unburied, Sing.
The first thing my Godsent said when I came through the door was, “I think I have this damn thing on backwards.”
They say that, for the longest time, Enrique didn’t know he was a superman. What he understood was that men liked his dick.
I was left abandoned, a rectangle in the middle of a square. Dasvidanya, they said, and kicked me on my side. It hurt so much that I wanted to cry, though I’ve also shed a few tears of joy during my many travels.
Ives discusses chasing false lures, testing the limits of relationships, and what’s been cut from her novel Impossible Views of the World.
I caught Elma licking her front teeth in the rearview mirror. The gap between them seemed to be getting wider, like Jane Birkin, whose teeth spread considerably apart as she grew older, an oral Pangea situation.
