By Sam Lipsyte The deli near Mediocre had a new wrap man. He rolled my order too tight. Turkey poked through the tan skin. I studied the damage through the translucent lid of the container. It was a bad way to begin my first day at my old job. I rode the elevator up with [...]

By Daniel Stolar I know my husband, Terry, sometimes looks at Internet pornography — masturbates to Internet pornography, nobody just looks — so it’s not like I’m terribly shocked at the screen that appears when I wake up his computer.  Still, it is disconcerting, in the frank afternoon sunlight pouring through our plantation blinds. In [...]

By Jean Thompson He didn’t know he was hearing music. The stuff they played in stores sneaked up on you like that. Music was only part of what you stepped into once you passed through the automatic glass doors and their obliging, unsealing, rubber-edged welcome. This was a big shopper’s paradise superstore, full of color [...]

By Jerry Gabriel When they moved from out West, they decided on a place far outside of the city, near a small town. It was just a hamlet, really, this town. A sign at the edge of it said, “Annecy, Ohio” and then below that, “Population: 800.” It wasn’t even on one of the maps [...]

By Randa Jarrar Everything was going pretty badly at my Baba’s house — messes that never got clean, zero privacy, constant mooning and pranks — and I was considering moving out for the fourth time in one day, when my brother Ibrahim decided to move back home with his new Catholic wife, Dorothy.  They’re only [...]

By Michael Dahlie
Henry had a large inheritance but the worst luck. He wanted to be liked but ended up take advantage of. He fell for his fourth cousin (not really a relation!). Everyone in Brooklyn found out about the faces he made while having sex. His worst misfortune, however, was still to come.

By Marisa Silver
Marie was ill with breast cancer and her family thought their Sahara adventure would be their final vacation together. Only a different secret might change everything.

By Sarah Malone Ellen was having lunch with Abby at Souen on West Thirteenth Street. One of their monthly lunches, though it was difficult now, finding time to meet. “You should move out near us,” Abby said. Their house — Abby and her husband’s, in New Jersey — was finally finished. They taught at NYU. [...]

By Michael Idov When the beluga-browed Airbus hit its tenth or eleventh air pocket descending upon St. Petersburg, Oscar Lunquist lost all shame and grabbed the forearm of his seat companion in 21B. A short-shorn woman twenty or so years Oscar’s senior and thus twice his age, she didn’t take the commandeered limb away but [...]

By Laura Kasischke
It was Tony’s young daughter’s first birthday party since the divorce. And going back home — the indignity of ringing his own doorbell, of his ex-wife looking so damn good — unleashes a torrent of frustration.

By Lori Ostlund I. The Last Time I have been defecated on three times in my life, literally crapped on that is, for I am not the sort to go around characterizing any victimization I might feel in such vulgar metaphorical terms. In each case, the offending party was a bird, the incidents occurring on [...]

By Allison Amend
When an ex-girlfriend dies and Garvey revisits his former life in Washington D.C., he realizes how much distance comes between old friends in a short period of time.

By Chip Kidd
Sure, nastiness sells. But put too much of it into the world and it might come back around to infect you most of all.

By A.L. Kennedy They’d considered the child and kept themselves circumspect. For her sake they had been in love, but quietly. Angela had lost a father, she was only eight, she would need stability and to feel herself the centre of attention for a while. Lynne had been clear about this from the start — [...]

By Joyce Carol Oates Klein, a nervous young man whose overcoat in winter hung down far below his knees, felt shame that he was several years older than his fellow students, felt shame that he was seized often by an inexplicable panic, alone or with others, felt shame that he was poor. He was a [...]

By Katherine Hester
Lola arrived at Woodlands mansion, a famous retreat for artists, to get her own writing done. But she quickly found her imagination drifting to ghost stories — and tales about what her fellow writers might be up to after hours.

By Saher Alam “We know only that in the earliest Greek poets a new point of view dawned, never dreamed of in the world before them, but never to leave the world after them.” “Mythology,” Edith Hamilton It is the middle of March in Troy.  You are more than fourteen and a half, and your [...]

By W. Andrew Ewell I was staying at the Jack Jouett Motel on 29 North, a two-floor formstone construction with cable television and a Howard Johnson’s restaurant glowing green and orange on the edge of the parking lot. Across the highway was a halfway house where the tenants sat in plastic folding chairs and smoked [...]

By Megan Mayhew Bergman On the first of March, 1821, Allegra Byron entered the Convento di  San Giovanni like a small storm, accompanied by non-relations, overdressed women who handled her with cool affection.  It was a clear morning, so we met our charge in the prayer garden, a patch of grass where a few ancient [...]