By Katie Chase
She loved a sailor, and her sailor loved the sea more than anything. With no guarantee that he would ever return to her, she made herself two people — the innocent woman she loved, and the less-innocent one who paid the bills on her own. But if he did return, would either one the recognize each other, wearing the disguises of all those years?

By Josh Weil He’d been squinting at the billboards since they passed through Basalt – what you’re working for… quality of life… the comfort you deserve – gold letters on blue signs, almost unreadable with that low sun shining straight into Cable’s eyes, the road all glare, and the desert made of glinting rock, and [...]

By Brendan Mathews “Ice,” Tommy said. Wilkie raised his eyebrows. “Ice?” “I don’t know how they do it, but the whole thing — walls, floors, beds, everything. It’s all ice.” “No thank you.” Wilkie’s voice was full of cigarette ash and outside work. “I’m not sleeping on no bed made of ice.” “They’ve got a [...]

By Corinna Vallianatos Lane and Sean were hunting for garbage. Lane was getting bored. “Show a little skin!” she shouted at the men loading onto buses in the outdoor plaza of Tucson’s Greyhound station. The men had wily, rash-red faces, and shuffled forward in jerks as if pursued by the jabbing handle of a rake. [...]

By Sandra Novack The story goes like this: Wednesday afternoon my neighbor, Mr. Gun-Metal, stops by my house. I should already have a premonition, like this will be the beginning of the end, but I don’t yet, of course, because I am stupidly optimistic in my own way, which, according to my husband, is not [...]

By Dean Bakopoulos I had gone to Mineral Point to see my kids and on the way back home I saw a dead yellow dog glowing in the washed-out day. I pulled over. I got out of my van, walked back twenty feet or so, and there was the dog, lying on its side, like [...]

By Valerie Laken So many people had moved out of the neighborhood that the dogs had just about taken over. Mostly they were forlorn and peaceful, but every once in a while a frenzy of barking and low-level madness would erupt in the back alley and lurch through the side yard toward the street. At [...]

By Michelle Huneven The woman’s brown wool skirt and tailored olive green jacket made Joe La Croix think of a Scottish huntress, though he’d never been to Scotland much less hung out with the hunting set there. She was forty, forty-five, solid, handsome and horse-y.  She strode straight to the licensing desk — licenses for [...]

By Andrea Dupree James Price learned of the experimental procedure while at work, perched before an ancient computer terminal. Over two dozen MEDLINE abstracts scrolled down the screen, and he could read them now, having become fluent in the tortured prose of pathology. Lithotripsy, the abstracts said. A non-invasive cure. In London, England, they said. [...]

By Clancy Martin My watchmaker’s dog, a stud Chow named Tiger, had torn the grill out of the crate at PetSmart (over on the south side of the mall, the cheap seats) and chased all of the customers and the employees up on the countertops. He had seized the store. It came over the wires [...]

By John Wray
J.P. was having the evening of a lifetime — heading from club to club in Manhattan in a beautiful Bentley with three even more beautiful girls (and his second cousin Leon). This was not the same thing as being upstate. But the night was still young.

By Will Boast The young salesman has been flirting from the moment I came through the door. He’s spaghetti pale and about as skinny, smiles at me like we’re already intimate. His hair is done up in spectacular dirty blonde dreadlocks — they bounce as he talks. We’re back in the music store’s drum department, [...]

By Todd Hasak-Lowy
Some people have a hard enough time moving on after a high school football career that isn’t everything they needed it to be. But when you’re also a Detroit Lions fan, the frustration and disappointment can be enough to color your entire life.

By Adam Haslett The house took a year to complete: three months to clear the land, bury the pipes, and dig a foundation, another seven for construction, and two more for interior work and landscaping. For the right sum, Mikey oversaw all of it. By the time it was done, the real estate market had [...]

By Julian Barnes “I thought that went very well,” Jane said, patting her handbag as the train doors closed with a pneumatic thump. Their carriage was nearly empty, its air warm and stale. Alice knew to treat the remark as a question seeking reassurance. “You were certainly on good form.” “Oh, I had a nice [...]

By Jay McInerney
He just got used to it at the time. But in retrospect, the marriage started to unravel around the time the pot-bellied pig joined them in bed.

By Lara Vapnyar
Guys often said they liked talking with Ruzena; she thought this was because she listened without saying much of her own. But when she started telling her lover lies, she discovered some truths about herself.

By Vendela Vida
There are lessons you learn from your parents. And then there are the ones you learn from your mother’s dangerously wild college roommate.

By Mark Jude Poirier Friday morning, Brooke Amari shuffled into Henry Stirling’s sophomore English class wearing jeans so low-waisted that a spray of wild pubic hair curled over her sparkling, sequined belt.  It was dark hair, unlike the hair on her head, which was the color of hay and pulled into a tight, shellacked bun. [...]

By Amy Shearn
Her appendix explodes. Her aunt wants her kidney. And her boyfriend crushes her spirit. Is Mimi’s heart also just a spare part?

By Ken Chowder
Portland’s a small city. And it only seems smaller when you’re trying to deal with your wife leaving you for another woman.

By Irina Reyn
Regina was new to New York, and new to the ways of American men. But while she left Russia for a new life in the U.S., could she learn to leave her old insecurities and bad habits behind?

By Yiyun Li
As a young woman is put to death in China for her political dissent, her parents, neighbors and even fellow countrymen far from the provincial city of Muddy River have their lives altered in vastly unexpected ways.

By Maile Meloy
A Presidents’ Day weekend ski trip would surely be just the thing to soothe the life-long tensions between two ultra-competitive brothers.

By David Schickler
Kasper was the coolest kid in school. Jude was his loyal sidekick, thrilled to bask in Kasper’s glow. Except high school is never that simple.

By Max Ross Among the things that Thomas took when my father broke up with him was an enlarged Polidori photograph of a cave that had hung in their bedroom. “I mean, yeah, I’m pissed,” Dad said. “But maybe more importantly, this just goes to show exactly what I’ve been talking about.” “Thomas’s immaturity,” I [...]

By Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop Tomorrow, the boat goes in. All it needs is a final coat of paint on its underside, which, if Porter gets it on right now, should be dry by tomorrow’s noon high tide, the start of summer. He stands on the lawn, a can of paint dangling from one hand, a [...]

By Matthew Vollmer
College was for those perfect fresh-faced kids on the course catalog, not for Jennifer, who simply started attending classes to see if she could get away with it. But once at North Atlantic College, she studied a different picture — and this one had quite a real-life effect.

By Jon Raymond
Class lines blur when a wealthy man hires two Mexicans to do yardwork at his house, then invites them to stay and join his friends for a fancy meal to celebrate his divorce.

By Urban Waite Eddie called on the phone and when I picked up he said, “Rob?” and then the line went quiet and I said hello. We hadn’t talked in over a year and when he knew it was me his voice went all smooth, like he was floating on water and he said, “Rob” [...]

By Adam Ross We were sitting on the floor of Will’s dorm room, smoking pot, when the conversation turned to death. “My sister, Elise, saw her boyfriend get killed in a car wreck,” Casey said. She exhaled contemplatively, blowing a stream of smoke toward the lit end of the joint, which she held like a [...]

By Preeta Samarasan
Sujata was only 15 and already a wife when the Japanese invaded in 1942. But what the entire town wanted to know was: What happened to her?

By Ann Hood Years later, Isabella would think of that summer of 1918 as the summer of ice. Already, it had become the summer of the Great War. People blamed everything on the fact that the world had gone mad. Dogs howled into the night. Hail as big as plums fell from the sky, not [...]

By Samantha Peale On a scorching Monday in May, I drove to Super King. The store’s tall windows reflected the towering palms thrashing and the sky was the color of an old steel blade. I stepped out of my car into a strange dry wind. Francisco leaned against the façade of the yellow building. He [...]

By Amanda Eyre Ward
Choose your poison: Be an unpopular teenager in an exclusive town who lives at the cheap hotel your mom works at, or be an unpopular teenager whose mom marries a sad dreamer. Hey, how about one, and then the other. Sorry, Suzy.

By Lauren Grodstein The Super 8 Motel in Wendover, Nevada, was fairly Spartan even for one-star accommodation, but when Lakshmi pulled in at 8:30 p.m., thirteen hours after she’d left Berkeley, the place seemed as luxurious as the Winter Palace. A big parking space right up front. Free coffee in the lobby. A maroon-quilted double [...]