Before we entered the most raved about amusement park in the world, we went into the woods nearby . . . 

John’s hands are on the wheel, very still, and he’s looking straight ahead at the dark yellow lines of Route 66.

The Millennial aspect is important because, like many Millennials, its protagonist does not wear labels easily.

You mean to say, “hello” or “good morning,” but you know that, between us, that would be strangely inappropriate before our morning cup of coffee

We go to a bar for lunch that serves free candy.

I got a flat tire last month and my life spiraled out of control just a half mile from the rest stop.

Jared punches like dang. Gouges, arm-bars. Breaks windows at theme parties.

But the true malevolence of Majka’s world—the thing that traps her characters in a state of lifelong discontent—most often manifests in mundane hauntings: regret and remorse, vanished love and vanished youth, feelings of dislocation and the inability to belong

Christopher Boucher’s new novel, Golden Delicious (Melville House), is a kind of referendum on all we presently hold dear in fiction. Its emotional hold on the reader is very strong, but its avant-garde methods critique those special effects by explaining what they’re doing to your feelings while they do it, which somehow only makes the book more sad.

here were girls who sank/ a thousand leagues beneath his hips/ and never bobbed back for air. I came ashore/ in a body of my own, crooked gate/ and piano fingers

Two weeks after the scientist’s freak exposure, a man in black arrived at his front step. It was the weekend, and the man in black brought with him a gift: a jumble of neon material he removed from

The goal of short fiction is up for debate, but it seems to me that, if a story has a single job, it is to subvert the expectations of the reader.

I’m shoving fat candles into dirt,
blowtorching the wicks and tooting
horns.

I couldn’t render enough tallow
to properly honor over 4 billion years,
sorry,

you have so many hills.

The cousin had called my thesis advisor and said something like, “Hey, film professor cousin, can you do this film for us?” and my thesis advisor was like, “Hey, no. But I know a guy who is still unemployed four months after graduation and is about to get evicted.”

We spent that summer on Dad's couch trying not to move, because if we didn’t move we wouldn’t spend

Dibs

In Chicago, we use dibs to take
ownership of what we will never own.
Traffic cones, rusted patio chairs, strollers,
a pair of orange Home Depot buckets.
Flanking the concrete.  We

He started as a single Clay Aiken, the one we all knew with the smiling face and aw-shucks demeanor

Her first reaction was to laugh: "That's so like you, Camilla, to lose an entire car." 

It’s clear that most of these students hate Sal, Dean, and Kerouac.

believing in nothing
listening to jazz
cooking purple sprouting
rituals evoking
somelike
the aspirations
of the expectations
of a certain