By Katharine Weber In 1920, Eli and Morris left their little brother Julius in Budapest with some cousins. There is nothing in any Zip’s Candies record or family story with details about what provisions, if any, they made for him. Did they feel guilty about Julius, abandoned at the last moment with the Fischer family, [...]

By Miroslav Penkov I was born just twenty years after we got rid of the Turks. 1898. So yes, this makes me seventy-one. And yes, I’m grumpy. I’m mean. I smell like all old men do. I am a walking pain, hips, shoulders, knees and elbows. I lie awake at night. I call my daughter [...]

By Kamila Shamsie

Alexander Maksik is the author of the novel “You Deserve Nothing.” Alice Sebold says that “Alexander Maksik’s relentless engagement of ideas and literature and the depiction of his characters who are hopeless in the way all of us are hopeless, makes for one of the most engaged reads I’ve had in years. You Deserve Nothing [...]

Ryan McIlvain is the author of the novel “Elders.” T,C. Boyle calls it “a nuanced meditation on faith and commitment that has all the intensity of a stage play. ‘Elders’ is a powerful and deeply moving debut from a gifted young writer.” Aimee Bender adds that “‘Elders’ is layered and fascinating, with a complex human [...]

By Jincy Willett
The men had passed out after a grand dinner party. And the conversation among the women suddenly took a turn. Might it be the pistachios?

By Jess Row In Ati’s kitchen, her hands ghost-white with rice flour, Jihwon is telling the story of how, when she was eight, her brother jumped on top of her from the high branches of a pear tree in her uncle’s backyard in Pusan. She caught the full force of the impact on her lower spine, [...]

By Alexander Maksik Anna had moved out of the halls and, for the first time in her life, was living alone.  It was a good flat in Foxhill Road with freshly painted walls and a small fireplace in the living room.  Her parents took the train over and the three of them ate pizza on [...]

By Dawn Ryan “Where we going?”  Beth asked. “We going to the blacktop?” That’s where they played, a tar-topped broken bottled parking lot outside their apartment building. Tall, climbable pines stood along the edge of the blacktop. Beth liked it there. She could hide in the trees. Beth and Sara played barefoot, dodging glass shards [...]

By Skip Horack The mall was busy with shoppers and buy-nothings, but it was still well past noon before I had my first climber. Bad sign. Yet another slow day for me and Monkey Mountain. It was Theo Corrigan, my redheaded shortstop — strongest bat on the team, but ugly as a mud fence and [...]

By Leslie Jamison The mountain was their mother. She chewed the sunlight and spit it out between her teeth like coca. Her mouths were made of dirt. Her tits were full of silver. She had killed a thousand men, maybe more. The sun looked at her like a man looks at a woman, fierce and [...]

By John Jodzio After Chloe’s last suicide attempt, the one with the grapefruit knife, her father, Greer Burton cleaned out the storage space above his garage.  He horsed an exam table destined for scrap off the University Hospital’s loading dock and bumped it up his back stairs with the hospital’s dolly.  He purchased a cut-rate [...]

By Kevin Grauke He peeked over his magazine at the other two men in the waiting room of the Gladstone Clinic, wondering if, like him, they’d come to see how well their “boys could swim,” as Dr. Victorino had put it the day before in what Parrish guessed had been an attempt at levity and [...]

By Ruiyan Xu A gay man always knows what kind of gay he is. Some of us make that determination early in life. Others deny and waffle, interloping into different types as if trying on costumes. But we are all interlopers, all invented, determined, performed selves. “Selves,” I say, as if there is such a [...]

By Ashley Warlick My son, who lives deep in the wilderness of three years old, checks my heartbeat with a plastic stethoscope. He says, Almost done, Mama, one more. I breathe for him. He says, You’re here, which is what he says when I come home from work. When he talks on the telephone, he [...]

By Anthony Swofford
She was proud to be Idi Amin’s mistress, to love the most powerful and feared man in Africa. But she also wanted to bear his children, and no deal with the despot ended with one’s humanity intact.

By Keith Lee Morris
All of a sudden, college started coming a little too easy.