By Lynne Griffin • “My pencils outlast my erasers.” —Vladimir Nabokov “I’m all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.” —Truman Capote There’s consensus among writers that writing is…
Thank you for your e-mail informing us of the incident that has upset your daughter Dolores.
What you describe in your e-mail as “duck rape” must have been bewildering for a young lady to see for the first time, but I assure you that it is a natural process….
Welcome to the July 2020 edition of new fiction we can’t wait to read! Aimee Bender, The Butterfly Lampshade “By the end, the book reveals itself as a meditation on memory, identity, and the sometimes-uncanny relationship between living beings…
By Ian Randall Wilson • When I wrote in third person, it was in third-person close. The concerns of simultaneity didn’t occupy much of my attention. There may be a flaw in my thinking here, but my reasoning was…
By Alyson Mosquera Dutemple • In the very first line of his story “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” Edward P. Jones signals to readers to expect repetition and recurrence throughout the rest of the piece: “The first time…
What they don’t show when John Bender crosses the Shermer High School football field, trench coat flapping in the wind and arm punching the air, is where he’s headed after his day of detention. He’s not going fishing with…
By Mike Goodwin • In my brief career teaching fiction workshops, the bar story has appeared too often as a genre vying for literariness. Students have written about debauchery at house parties, barns, parks, cemeteries, and, of course, bars.…
By Mike Goodwin • I once earned a well-deserved reaming for my writing an awful story involving who I viewed as lower-class patrons inhabiting a dive bar. The narrative too often emphasized these characters giving each other the business…
I prepare my tools for the excavation. Placing the suspect object onto a sterilized operating surface and unpackaging fresh picks and scalpels. It is 4.3 x 7 x 1.2 inches. A small rectangular stack of papers bound together. With…
“We want you to know how we lived. That we lived. That we were girls before we were game. That we were alive.” Essay by Melissa Benton Barker • Gayle Brandeis’s recent novel-in-verse, Many Restless Concerns (a testimony):…
