fiction

Wordwatching

"Her eyes watch as the words curl out of her mouth. Her eyes watch as her thumb and forefinger dart and rush after her words to catch them. She is picking her words out of the air. Her mouth opens and closes. She mouths. She jaws. She is word-gathering."
Gay James

Gone

"We had heard that these sorts of games were dangerous, that if we were to become part of local legend, if other girls were to keep watch over us, one of us must level out with the top of the set, then catapult over the chain-link to the street on the other side, land in a heap of wasted child-body, lie in rivers of blood. Be gone."
Danielle Lazarin

Desaliento

"We were at the nude beach one cloudy afternoon when he was thinking it all over out loud. I was topless and Diego was completely on display, which, looking back, should have been awkward for us, but it wasn’t."
Patricia Engel

The Last Time I Saw Junior

"I imagined what I'd like to do to him, and everyting I imagined I'd do made blood. I mean real blood. I'd made blood happen in the past. Not gun blood, not bullets, not knife wounds. I wasn't a killer. But broken teeth, yes, absolutely."
Dagoberto Gilb

Mugger and Mouse Get Married

"Mugger and Mouse get married on a cool day in June. The war is over, but there are rumors of another."
Michael Agresta

A Baby Is A Baby Is A Baby

"Had someone caught on early and agreed to do away with him before his fingernails and toenails grew..."
Matthew Stuart

The Cynic

"If you listen to those who are wise..."
Charles Johnson

The Art of Dying

"Mona Skye, the duelist and poet of lately tragic fame, lay where her friends had placed her: on brocade cushions in a corner of the smoking room beneath the Amber Tree café."
K.J. Bishop

Barbarians' Fantasies

Peter Mountford
"The film crew hadn’t been down long before my girlfriend Lenka started sleeping with Russell Crowe’s driver."

In Rut

Madeline Kotowicz
"Days before, a wildfire to the east turned the sliver of moon hazy blood-orange."

Siblings

Yvonne Woon
"I came into this world in parts, jumbled together with my brother."

archive

Revolutionary Road

Read Stewart O'Nan's 1999 article which renewed public interest in Richard Yates's literary career. The film version of Revolutionary Road is due out later this year.

 

essays

Intimate Revenge

Writing the Troubles
Roger Boylan

We Laughed, We Cried

Flann O'Brien's Triumph
Roger Boylan

The Mirror

Imagining justice in Palestine
Elias Khoury

Justify the Enemy

Becoming human in South Africa
Zakes Mda

The Monarch of All

The fantasy world of John Cowper Powys
Roger Boylan

For Love and Money

Ha Jin's A Free Life
Mythili G. Rao

Out of Exile

Notes on Bulgarian literature
Dimiter Kenarov

A Fiendish Mood

The mid-century novels of "the other Elizabeth Taylor"
Neel Mukherjee

Something For Myself

Haruki Murakami's strange world of hope
Catalina Holguí

Lastingness

Nicholas Delbanco

Nabokov's Legacy

Roger Boylan

Whole Sight

On artistic passion
Charles Johnson

Brazil's Dreamer

Pop star and novelist Chico Buarque
Scott Saul

Found in Translation

César Aira's How I Became a Nun and Roberto Bolaño's Amulet
Aura Estrada

Metamorphosis

Rosamond Purcell's natural history
John Crowley

Homeland

On the new generation of Nigerian novelists
Andrée Greene