In a roadside gas station along Highway 21, in the Missouri Ozarks, I scan the beer cooler. Less than 100 miles south of St. Louis, AB-InBev products dominate my view. The red and white
Barb Johnson worked as a carpenter in New Orleans for more than 20 years before entering the MFA program at the University of New Orleans. While in the writing program, she won a grant from the
Inside, in the unforeseen, where the sounds of dust susurrus, we glimpse rainbowed light above the shadows. Will we ever reach there, we ask?
Wonders I. Wonders we.
Will and I decided to make "Y" shaped slingshot frames and drape an earthworm between the two of them.
Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is like every good girl’s fantasy of being bad turned on its head and twisted into her biggest nightmare. Faith (Selena Gomez) has been friends with Candy (Vanessa
It started that stupid night you convinced me to walk with you over the bridge and along the river. I shouldn't have done that and I knew it—even before we left, I knew it—and I thought to
My boyfriend hit me in the face with a book. It was an accident, his hitting me. He only meant to hand me the book. He meant to hand the book back to me. But my face was in its path, he said.
The twelve stories in Susan Steinberg’s stunning third book, Spectacle, limn the desperate, neon-lit reality we’re forced to confront when we wake up from the American dream. They make me want to
The clinical term for what happened was a myocardial rupture, which basically means her heart exploded under the stress of her living. I got the call while I was taking a Latin quiz, and I'll
A comic about a yak, that may or may not be an anarchist, in a world that is huge and/or the yak may be incredibly tiny.
Maria say she gon' tell me the future. She say she know. Mama taught her, but Maria had that gift, not her mama. The real kind. She'd seen all kinds of things 'fore they happen, like her brother shot dead in that parking lot, she'd seen it all four days before it happened.
What you gon' tell me I don't already know? I say.
“We’re playing Memory Palace. It’s a medieval memory technique. If you need to remember a list of things, you pick a place that you remember well, like your childhood home or your office or your apartment, and you make a narrative...
Just in time for the opening bell (or is it more approrpriately an opening toast) of AWP in Boston tomorrow, we present Daniel Torday's "A&W&P." We first ran this story before AWP last
There were wolves near there. Wolves killing sheep. Poetry is dead. He thought. He could lend a hand.
You wake up to the sound of someone smashing white rocks outside your window. Only it's not rocks. You're just in a city made entirely of bones.
I read for the same reason that I fish. So I can feel what I can’t see.
A panel of grandfathers lived in the girl like a Greek chorus. One day she woke and they were building themselves bleachers. After that they didn’t do anything. Tired, they complained. They shouted
Self-portrait as fogged up car. / Self-portrait as Home Depot // parking lot at 3 AM, no cars, / no people. Self-portrait with // grocery cart with someone else’s / left behind list.
The Platonic Man cries whenever I cry. Tears will be streaming down my face and I’ll look up and he’ll be dabbing his eyes with a cloth napkin.
"I know why you cry,” I say at the Cuban
She said, during the commercial break, that she was a fan of westerns. I said, I loved the train heist trope. She told me that we were going to wait on dinner, or that we should order in. I said, I
"Thought of you and our conversations this morning when I read David Shields' Riff column in the NYT Magazine. I get the sense that you're not particularly engaged with him one way or
Hello, readers. This is the first of two interviews with writer Ron Currie Jr. on the occasion of the publication of his new—and positively badass—novel Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles. Why two
I can take just about anything now.
Like how I returned from Christmas vacation to an inch of melted snow and a gaping hole above where I pee. Lake Effect, my landlord said, simply, squinting
