The Atlanta AWP was the first one that... more

Jensen Beach looks back at Todd Cantrell's "Fitzhugh Falls" from Hobart January '11.

It is a well known but oft forgotten fact that children are unable to tell lies in the dark. With adults you can never be certain. Some can, some can’t. It depends upon the retained permeability of their heart. 

I vividly remember reading this piece for the first time, and being totally surprised, because I feel like it's not... more

I can tell you right now that the visual of thousands of Santas running naked through the Finnish/Russian countryside with... more

Cynthia wakes to coffee smell and the sounds of William getting breakfast ready for the kids. She closes her eyes and for a moment, it is as... more

Across the street, I see a large, jolly-looking man with a white beard and white hair leaving the house of our friends, David and Shelby. The man is wearing camouflage – the jacket, hat and hip waders of a duck hunter.

I got off, one night, at the exit to pee, / but was afraid to enter the shop. Afraid / of the porn, I parked behind the shaft

Lugging along next to me on the elliptical is an older gentleman – about the age my dad would have been – wearing two high-tech knee braces, fit with gears and everything, and what looks like an old-fashioned weight belt. He’s a regular at the fitness center, same as me. We’ve acknowledged each other on occasion and said a thing or two in the sauna, but never a real question-and-answer. I’ve always wondered about his knees.

Top Ten of 2012

  It’s the 26th of September 2007. I’m driving from work to pick up my daughter at school. On the radio Melissa Block... more

Bad guy has no luck.  Here he is walking the aisles of the home and garden center, checking hoses for flexibility, thickness.  

When it starts to rain we cross the street. I don’t know where we’re going, but something warm and scattered is jumping underneath my skin. He leads me to the door of an apartment building, nudges me onto its small step. Then, smooth as a cloud moving across the sky, he presses his body against mine.

The Way We Sleep, an anthology of prose, comics, interviews, all about how we spend our time in and around beds was... more

This Evan Williams Eggnog has all of what you’d expect in a nog. That strong taste of Christmas, of vanilla and cream and cinnamon and nutmeg.

flowering and husking in the cornfield. Blooming / and ripping ourselves open. Surprising even our kin.

The A.D.T. man has only come to fix the security system, check each connect, repair the wire that’s frayed, reprogram the alarm before he drives off to do the same thing three blocks over. He wants no part in these people’s lives, he has no heart to join their quest for the secure, their rich man fantasy they can protect themselves, if only they will pay.

We imagine all nightmare scenarios, where you do not text us back because you are dead, and won’t we look insensitive for imagining that you hate us.

In the original 1937 edition of The Hobbit, Tolkien promises in his description, “If... more

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time in the evening. But here you are, and you cannot... more

Aaron “Jesse Pinkman” Paul and Mister White (aka Heisenberg, aka Walt, aka Bryan “Malcolm’s Dad” Cranston) are making meth in a cavernous and secret meth-cave.

You win the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect but your relativity theory is what makes you famous.

When talking dirty, be sure to use action words and nouns that cause pictures inside people’s heads. End with an image and don't explain. 

The prison is a test market—a closed circuit, a place where candymakers can focus on the choices made when options are limited. Research into what people will eat when they have nowhere to go.

On the one hand, it was tough for Tessa to be let go by the Internet company, but it meant that she could now fulfill... more

  Searching for her mother, as well as caring for the people she loves as they battle for... more

  Derek barely slows down at intersections. Not anymore. Not since we got that card reader and “set out toward the... more

  You tell Jeff Bridges you fear your dying breath will be just like the whimper you make when... more

Although Woody Allen (Alvy Singer) might be the most adorable hipster on the face of the planet and I consider his... more

No one called it a plague at first.  We weren’t the kind of people who used words like that, words heavy with the suggestion of some greater force, but the idea was there, almost from the beginning, skittering around in the back of my head, peeking out into the light.