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 is telling me... 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 you care... 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 survival,... 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 trying
to... 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.

tell me, what are we looking for, don’t die right now

The table is in the room and the room has a table in it

At 32 she whistled for the first time and was alarmed by her talent.

For this non-reader spotlight, I talked to Sean Olumstad. Sean and I met as undergrad theatre majors at Illinois Wesleyan, but Sean made the wise move to pursuing a career in nursing.

On the day we come with Daddy down the mountain, Momma wakes us up early while Daddy's still asleep, pulls out white poster boards, markers from the closet, and together, we draw babies. Heads with black eyes, bodies curled, hands in mouths, a blue cord running from their bellies to somewhere off the page.