By Lawrence Douglas
Someday, Richard assumed, he would finish his doctorate, get a teaching position at a third-rate college, and live a small unthreatening life. And then he moved in with Sasha.

By James Hynes One sunny afternoon in April, not long after her release from the hospital, Susanna looked out the front window of her apartment and saw someone sitting behind the wheel of her car. She had been tidying up the living room, putting books away, straightening three-month-old New Yorkers on the coffee table. She [...]

By Aurelie Sheehan
Go west, young woman! There’s never a good reason to leave New York. But what happens when a bizarre family dynamic, a bachelor’s in art history and a rocking manicure make you take a job at a museum in Tucson. Isn’t there a bad Eagles song about that?

By Ben Greenman
Two sisters. Two marriages. But in a small town, your past never really goes away. Sometimes, it even comes and lives out in the barn.

By Vendela Vida
On the day of her father’s funeral, 28-year-old Clarissa Iverton discovers that he wasn’t her biological father after all. Her mother disappeared 14 years ago, and now Clarissa is alone and adrift. The one person she feels she can trust, her fiance, Pankaj, has revealed the life-changing secret. Her birth certificate is a clue to finding her real father, and it leads her from New York to Helsinki then north of the Arctic Circle, to Lapland.

By Peyton Marshall Julian stumbled into the kitchen. He was late for work and half-dressed and he squinted at the mugs in the dish rack. He tried to pick a clean one without the help of his glasses. “You are a relentless egoist,” a voice announced from the other side of the room. This was [...]

By Robert Voedisch It was right after his funeral that I found out my father had been the Beast. I’d just gotten back from the cemetery and was sitting in his kitchen, going through some of his things, when the phone rang. It was a reporter from the paper in Duluth. She said she was [...]

By Tatjana Soli It sucked. Caitlin had volunteered at the hospital mostly to avoid having to go home to Phoenix after spring term ended, to her parents’ new empty-nester duplex on the golf course in the barren Arizonan desert that she refused to get used to. She figured the volunteering would consist of working in [...]

By Kevin Moffett
He was the birdman. And the birds would not let him forget it.

By Adam Braver
The scam seemed perfect — when someone dropped their car off at the garage for the afternoon, they’d grab his address from the registration and use his own keys to get inside and steal him blind. One unforeseen problem: it’s Nov. 22, 1963 and President Kennedy has just been shot.

By Rick Moody
Two previously unpublished excerpts from Rick Moody’s acclaimed memoir.

By Paul LaFarge
Think a short story can change the entire arc of your college life?

By Stefan Merrill Block Eight thousand years ago, in the constellation Sagittarius, two stars crashed and then exploded with the force of a few octillion nuclear warheads.  When two stars collide in just the right way, the way the Sagittarius stars died, their combustion fires an ultra high-powered beam of gamma radiation that obliterates whatever [...]

By Vestal McIntyre Joseph McCall was the type of person for whom if something was wrong, everything was wrong, and there was no joy in the world until that one thing was put right again.  If he burned his tongue on coffee, it would be days before he enjoyed the flavor of ice cream again, [...]

By Deanna Fei The year she turned twenty-five, Scarlett found God. This happened in a Korean Presbyterian church in Queens. Almost immediately she became a regular at Sunday service; in a matter of months she was baptized; and then she was given her own Sunday school class to teach. It seemed she’d found her calling [...]

By Dallas Hudgens
The plan was simple. Grab an expensive item off the shelf at Target and return it for cash. The security guard was a kid. The manager was off. It was almost closing time. His girl would be waiting in the parking lot. What could possibly go wrong?

By Daniel Torday When I saw Bubi the umpteenth time I was looking for a Velvet Underground record — White Light, White Heat — and he kept trying to sell me some mid-career Serge Gainsbourg LP. I think it was the one with Jane Birkin, the one with “Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus.” I was [...]

By Matthew Sharpe At twenty-six, Karl Floor had had a hard life: father dead, mother dead, stepdad sick and mean, siblings none, friends none, foes so offhanded in their molestations that they did not make a crisp enough focal point for his energies. Not that he had many energies — he had few. He wasn’t [...]

By Dwight Allen Near the end of his eulogy, Bennett takes a folded-up sheet of notebook paper from his coat pocket. He unfolds the sheet and holds it up, as if he were a child doing show-and-tell or a prosecutor displaying a piece of evidence. He says, “Here’s a sample of how Hal occupied himself [...]

By Joe Pernice If we didn’t get evicted, I gave us until the beginning of January before we said fuck it and started smoking everything inside. I stopped coughing just long enough to pass the microscopic roach to Traci. Her fingers were colder than chrome. “Nice not worrying about random drug tests,” she said. “Fucking [...]