A hunk of butter hits the fry pan. Then two pieces of bologna. Sparks of grease jump and sizzle. My dad’s hands—massive, oil-stained, almost old—slash tiny gashes into the bubbles of perfectly pink meat. White bread and yellow mustard…
By Kent Kosack • Prose shines, comes into its own as a medium, when writers make the internal conflicts we all suffer through, each and every second, external. I don’t mean simply dramatization in the form of scenes. I…
He’ll want the Moana one with zippers like cresting waves and straps that glisten blue plastic glitz. He’ll cry that Michelle Naylor’s mom let her buy that one in purple. You’ve only met Michelle Naylor’s mom once, at family…
Here are the books we are most looking forward to reading this month! Julia Alvarez, Afterlife “Alvarez’s prose is magnetic as she delves into the intricacies of sisterhood, immigration, and grief, once again proving her mastery as a…
In a 2015 review in The Los Angeles Times, the late Pulitzer Prize–winning restaurant critic Jonathan Gold describes an amuse-bouche at Le Comptoir in Koreatown as “a course that takes a cook 10 minutes to plate and that you…
They taught us how to kill with assault weapons, bayonets, bare hands. They taught us the lay of the land, how to navigate by rivers and stars, how to use cover to outflank enemy operatives, how to make a…
The last time I picked Hallie up at the airport, she was wearing a ratty beige shift that would’ve been a nightshirt if not for the decorative navy rickrack at the neck. Instead of hello, she said, “You hate…
In all those moments after he’d lit the fuse but before the rocket-powered roller skates propelled him across the yellow desert at sublimely sub-sonic speeds, in all those moments what came most vividly to Coyote the Younger were the…
Everyone expected me to take my mother’s eyes. I had a right to take what I wanted, and her eyes were legendary. She’d taken them from her mother, and her mother had taken them from her mother. They were…
By Candace Walsh • “We live in a world that has unconstrained wildness, and we like to forget we are part of that wildness,” says Madeline ffitch, author of PEN/Hemingway Award–finalist Stay and Fight. Fiction that only acknowledges characters’…
