I first experienced the pitfall of a slow reply with my boyfriend D. We were thirteen. After seventh period let out and we went home for the evening, we would text all night on our pre-iPhones. Mine was a…
1. Fallen leaves are a quiet palette of cut glass; they are a funeral in the church of nature. They make you think of pastry, damp strata from an earlier rainfall, or spirit-shadows looping into the distance. You want…
One day when I was little, I trespassed the aluminum gate that was next to our little orchard in search of a Frisbee or Nerf ball or some such thing that we had sent flying, accidentally, over the barbed…
Memoirist Jeannie Vanasco’s third book, A Silent Treatment, will be released by Tin House on September 9. Jeannie’s mother starts using the silent treatment shortly after she moves into a renovated apartment in Jeannie’s home. Over the five years…
Vaishnavi Patel and I met in our first year of law school—well before she’d published her New York Times-bestselling debut, Kaikeyi. By the time that book came out, we were fast friends, drawn together by our passion for civil…
A year ago, we asked each other: what is direct address, really? We knew the craft definition, of course: a technique in which a narrator overtly addresses a secondary group or figure (such as a reader or another character).…
Tom McAllister’s It All Felt Impossible is exactly what its subtitle promises: “42 Years in 42 Essays.” Of course, what makes it literary; what makes it a hypnotic, engaging, magical read; what makes it one of my favorite books…
I’m not sure I’ve ever come across any other region named as evocatively as the Driftless region of Wisconsin. Driftless: the word itself refers to the area’s lack of glacial deposits (or “drift”), as the land was passed by…
By Sean Collard • There’s a risk in learning how to write well: the danger of forgetting why you started. I worry that someday I’ll become so polished, so precise, that I’ll lose the very thing that made my…
Current Life Situation: Lucrative Work-Assignment, Stable Marriage-Union, Model Son. After daily work-duty, take Municipal Transporter to Metro-Sector T—Genome Modification Center—and receive Target Sequence Update. Then hurry home. Find Model Son (name Theo) at study-station, solving math problem concerning volume…
The challenge of this piece is to suggest in less than 1,000 words, with a bare minimum of info dumping, enough context for an unfamiliar speculative world to be satisfyingly authentic. In this story, a lot is omitted about setting and the history of the future—likewise, almost nothing is known about any people other than the three-person family of characters. Are they representative of their society? Are their habits and dynamics universal? Is this a world where everyone has a food synthesizer and genetically deselects “undesirable” traits? Only the rich? What are the economic and political circumstances of this society? And what about nature? The characters go to a holographic park and the narrator says that birds are extinct. Are there “real” parks? Have all species disappeared from the face of the Earth? What is the state of the natural world? Ideally, the absence of so much fundamental information creates a sort of “negative” energy that is part of the story’s power current.
GREG HRBEK is the author of the novel Not on Fire, but Burning, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and an NPR Best Book of the Year. His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Tin House, and numerous literary journals, and in The Best American Short Stories anthology.
