Summer isn’t over yet! Here’s a look at the new August fiction releases CRAFT can’t wait to read. We’re in another great month for short story collections! Happy pub day to one and all… Ayşe Papatya Bucak, The Trojan War…
by David K. Slay • Since the beginning of this year, I have been on a team of first readers for CRAFT, a literary journal with a mission to “explore the art of fiction with a focus on the…
Once you could sleep. At five a.m. the ravens are a collective of voices, neighbors in the apartment next door. You wake to their arguments or their lovemaking or their overwrought drunken discussions but there is no wall to…
By Jody Hobbs Hesler • “It seems like you don’t really care about your main character,” someone once told me in a workshop. Maybe they sensed an underlying issue with the character’s authenticity? A nebulous not-rightness about the prose?…
Chesed shel emet they call it—the truest loving-kindness, preparing a body for burial. Truest, because it is done at inconvenient times, in harshly lit rooms. Truest, because touching dead people isn’t fun. Truest, because the kindness can never be…
Essay by Melissa Benton Barker • In this cultural moment when bodies and embodied experiences that resist conforming to the cisgender, heterosexual male norm are increasingly marginalized and criminalized, Ariel Gore’s We Were Witches, feminist novel and anti-shame manifesto,…
Happy summer, readers! Here’s a look at the new July fiction releases CRAFT can’t wait to read. Happy pub day to one and all… Selva Almada, The Wind That Lays Waste (translated by Chris Andrews) “Selva Almada burns off all the…
The warden’s prowess with pastry had improved much over the years. It was all we heard the old inmates talk about. They talked about it the way old men on the outside talked about wars everyone else had forgotten.…
The situation could not stand. Perhaps if our prison had always been brutal, we could have endured, but there’s a special challenge in going from eating éclairs to being peeled. And there was not just the trouble of the…
The beatings continued, but once we slipped word to the guards of the baker’s vow, they did not worsen. By Saturday, we had adjusted to the new normal. Sunday was the sabbath, and anyway the guards must have had…
Technical challenges take time and precision: Ethan Chatagnier’s Author’s Note will publish on Friday, June 28.
ETHAN CHATAGNIER is the author of the short story collection Warnings from the Future (Acre Books, 2018). His short fiction has appeared in literary journals including The Georgia Review, Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review Online, New England Review, Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review, Barrelhouse, Witness, The Cincinnati Review, and Ascent. His story stories have been awarded a Pushcart Prize and listed as notable in the Million Writers Award. He lives in Fresno, California with his family.
