I was thinking about your book and its readers, and I thought about how there are three audiences. One is very large: people who have never met you. The second is very small: people who have known

Fish Stories

This friend of mine, Greg, he's always quitting smoking. He breaks his cigarettes in half, or runs them under the tap, or both, so he can't light up. He hides all his matches. And

She finds me in the backyard, behind the fence. I'm not crying because I've never been a child who cries. Instead I stare at the way the fence posts overlap, rotting, green and all worn down smooth

The Night Sky

Looking west over the ocean, watching the yellow crescent moon dip behind the low strip of fog off the coast. It disappeared and returned several times, as the fog bank in its

Unfortunately, Chin fed her sock puppets too many vegetables. She didn't always feed them in front of me, but the smell of steamed broccoli and half-empty bowls of it greeted me in our dorm suite

Nancy Lish was a simple woman with one simple obsession: she wanted to be a contestant on the game show Disk & Ladder. Every week she sent her postcard to the host, Peter Stimer, and at last,

A Conversation with Laird Hunt

A criminal operative helps a woman fill her shelves with mundane objects. A gentleman with psychic powers reflects on the days before his wife went insane. A

The man is older than the woman, but not by much. They're out for a stroll in the park, taking in the sunshine and fresh air. "Look at that," says the man, pointing at the mud. The man crouches

Not more than two steps in and Ali had the Sadness Museum exhibit sized up.

Her words, This exhibit is sad, sad, sad.

I tried to look on the bright side. My words, At least it's

One of the things that most fans don't know about NBA superstars, is that we like to meet in the off season and fight to the death. So, this past Saturday, I called LeBron James while I was

(Editor's note: this month, I asked a former Warren Wilson classmate of mine, Anna Clark, to – in a virtual setting – sit down with two other former classmates on the occasion of the publication of

A few minutes till closing on a Friday, a kid still in the library, no parent with him, too cold out for him to walk home if he lives any distance away, no coat, only a thin jacket over his shirt.

The Four Steps of Standard Plastination

1. Fixation

When Lily was born, it was decided she would be the last because the family already had too many children. She was named after her

Graham needs to be an interesting character. Graham is a doctor. Graham is a brain surgeon. Graham is a brain surgeon who worries that one day he will be alone in his apartment, nuking leftovers,

It was a long time before slavery went away. The town kept their own slaves well into the Carnegie Administration, trading them and gifting the young to newlyweds. When it was outlawed, seven

How To Play Shit

My brothers Kimi and Mike left with their friend Carmen to steal some watermelon Now & Laters from the deli across the street from the one run by Joe. We didn't steal from

AMY: Hello, Victor. Thank you for agreeing to talk with me again. As with our last interview, I'd like to start with a quote — not from Bruce Campbell this time, but from the epigraph of your

The sun wasn't even fully up yet and there I was, on some stranger's roof, about to begin work for the day, when this girl, maybe four or five years old, tottered down the front steps of the house

All his life the boy threw knives. In his youth he threw knives only in his mind, pretended himself the central attraction of a small but famous circus troupe that traveled the dusty southwest in

Take it from inside you and draw it out. Do it before it decides you are not what you seem to be and, as a result, holds you up by the thumbs. You are picking up that teacup, I see you. You are

In high school, dating Randall "Big Randy" Barton was a rite of passage for the small population of black girls at our exclusive boarding school in rural New Hampshire. His father was a prominent

The drinking life has been rendered in print on so many occasions, it seems unlikely that anyone could find anything new to say about it. It seems unlikely, but then Patrick DeWitt's

Molly Gaudry yanked me back from a depressing precipice. For the past three weeks I've been immersed in the world of Cormac McCarthy, climbing inside his mind via his newly opened archive at Texas

Carol Gipson had acne and was the slightest bit pudgy but she seemed like someone who would turn beautiful with time and I wanted to get in on the ground floor. To spend more time with her, I'd

I put on my suit. It's a business suit. I'm a businessman and I mean business. I mean 'business' with a big 'B' and an ampersand. So from now on, I will say, I'm a Businessman &. Because it

With apologies to Jorge Luis Borges' "Borges and I"

The other one, the one called Melcher, is the fuckup.

I travel a lot for work (sales) and when I'm driving or flying or sitting in an