The Life Cycle of Fire by Rosaleen Lynch
We can’t take Mam’s new baby to school, the boys guess as much from my silence and nobody wants Mam to wake and make Baby cry, so when I put him to feed there’s quiet, just suckling sounds and…
Tag: Voice
When It Gets Cold in the South, You Get a Jesus, You Get a Jesus, Everybody Gets a Goddamn Jesus by Exodus Oktavia Brownlow
Honey, MS, 1973 I When it gets cold in the South, Mama puts Devilish-Daddy out, again. It’s where he belongs, she says, cold is like warm milk to funny daddies like the one y’all got. All it gone do…
Kept by Jane Marcellus
Moores lived next door. He worked construction; she stayed home. I don’t know how old he was, but I remember that on her birthday, she turned twenty-two. It seemed old. I was twelve. Moores had a baby, Sidney. Their…
Graftings by Stella Lei
Hunger never came naturally to me. As a baby, I didn’t cry for milk, preferring to gaze at the mold-splashed ceiling and grab at dust motes, twining my tiny hands through their light. Elaine told me this was because…
And a Single Day by Randy William Santiago
We shall leave, for remembrance, one rusty iron heart. The city’s rusty heart, that holds both the hustler and the square. Takes them both and holds them there. For keeps and a single day. —Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on…
Interview: Lan Samantha Chang
In The Family Chao, publishing today from W. W. Norton, Lan Samantha Chang presents a contemporary Midwestern family in fascinating crisis. I was fortunate to work with Sam in 2018 during the final semester of my MFA studies at…
Interview: Randon Billings Noble
As a writer and professor, I am often on the lookout for books on craft to expand my thinking when I write and to expand my explanatory powers when I teach. A new anthology edited by Randon Billings Noble…
When We Drowned by Leigh Camacho Rourks
PROLOGUE: RANA Rana cannot speak. She’s eight years old, but Rana is incapable of yelling out to her sister that a smell—a smell not quite like gasoline spilling from the undercarriage of a rusted out four-wheeler, a smell darker…
Contingencies by Susan Perabo
This is what you do if he wakes up sad. This is what you do if he comes home angry. This is what you do if he stops taking his medication. This is what you do if he stays…
Interview: Robert Lopez
Robert Lopez’s fiction delves deep into those devastating moments which bring into question how it is we survive this strange, oftentimes volatile, experiment we call life. His characters are real people with real problems, many of them confused as…