Photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash The heat in the living room worked only sometimes, and there was a tangled hairball of exposed wiring in the upstairs bedroom, and the tumbledown stairs that descended from the front porch were crumbling—all this was how Kim could afford to live in the house on Front Street. […]
“Everyone probably gets entangled in a terrible relationship at least once in their life—even people who don’t carry centuries of inherited trauma,” declares the protagonist in poet and performance artist Nancy Agabian’s The Fear of Large and Small Nations. In the novel, a bisexual Armenian American woman in her late thirties, Na, enters a relationship […]
Orphan trains. Discovery of new moss species. Anti/love stories across race, ability, and socioeconomic class. Experimental animal blood transfusions. Leah Angstman’s debut short story collection Shoot the Horses First has delightful, and sometimes gruesome, historical fiction gems to entertain and educate about how far we’ve come as a society—and how far we have yet to […]
Luke Dani Blue’s debut collection Pretend It’s My Body: Stories places trans and queer people’s experiences at center stage in these stories about identity. They blend features of sci-fi, the surreal, horror, and psychological realism to tell the story of what it means to live in between. One of the great strengths of this collection […]
In Chaitali Sen’s A New Race of Men from Heaven, stories trade in understatement rather than flash, and it is this quality of restraint that activates their considerable power. Sen’s precise, unadorned sentences leave ample space between the lines, as if to give her characters sufficient room to navigate life’s challenges. Consider Dhruv, the protagonist […]
Photo by Kovid Rathee on Unsplash I. School, and she can’t breathe, and she forgot her inhaler again. She keeps forgetting, can’t keep things straight. Forgot her lunch last week, twice. The inhaler should stay with the nurse, but she needs it so often that she now keeps it in her desk, takes puffs once […]
Love and Other Rituals is an inspiring story collection that explores a wide range of Filipino characters who are moving through the world trying to understand love and the rituals that come along with it. The stories roam the Philippine Islands from Baguio, a beautiful mountainous area, to the busy streets of Manila and Cebu, […]
In a classroom, around the turn of the century, some writers and a professor gathered to dissect an early draft of a story. The professor asked the group, “What happens? Where’s the end?” The writers gave competing opinions until the author finally said, “We don’t know. That’s the point.” The beleaguered professor tossed a pair […]
Photo by Graham Holtshausen on Unsplash After Carl left me for a woman he met buying manure off Craigslist, I put in for an out-of-state letter carrier transfer with the postal service. I wanted a fresh start, a chance to discover something. It didn’t matter what. I wanted to learn something I never would […]
As the child of famous punk parents, Margot Highsmith is a daughter of privilege. When we first meet her, on a plane from New York to Montana, she seems in a bad way, though it’s not apparent why. What follows is a retrograde retelling of Margot’s life leading up to the moment when she abandons […]