“Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old,” wrote Brian Doyle in “Joyas Voladoras.” His recent death […]
During Antioch’s June 2016 residency, my mentor suggested I pick up a copy of Matt de la Peña’s Newbery Medal-winning picture book, Last Stop on Market Street, to explore the effective use of diversity in children’s literature. When I returned home to Arizona, I not only picked up a copy of de la Peña’s book, […]
Natashia Deón is a 2017 NAACP Image Award Nominee. The New York Times and Kirkus Review named Deón’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Grace, a Best Book of 2016. She is a practicing attorney and law professor, and creator of the popular LA-based reading series, Dirty Laundry Lit. Her works have appeared in American Short Fiction, Buzzfeed, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, and other places. Deón is the […]
We cannot tell these Sunday drivers that we have already faced judgment, that we’ve pled no contest to our sins, that we are only lesser criminals, serving a softer version of hard time. Their looks could never be as harsh as handcuffs and a hangover on the hard benches of a holding cell. We are […]
I get so tired out by the need to defend literature’s usefulness in terms of these measurable, moral and productive terms. Obviously this is important for humanity, thinking about our own interior experiences and how they bump up against other people’s interior and exterior experiences, so I always feel tired out by the weak position of literature and always having to defend it in this capitalist society, or usefulness-driven society. …
in the dream that got me fired The plane was just a stomach, really. I said, “eat me” It insisted on retching and language was like dry bread cu-clut-clawing at my throat. clog glug we could just say it was the fault of the Security Clearance, oh that agency is in the blood now, lineage […]
When I think back to that bar in Houston, the one that offered us mahogany and beveled glass and a brief reprieve from our hot, damp lives, I can still see Lynda and me: my blue-jean jacket, her skeleton earrings. We’ve swiveled onto our stools, and she’s paid for our drinks. She is laughing, leaning […]
Dara Hyde loves books. After a decade as an editor and rights and permissions manager at the independent publisher Grove Atlantic in New York, Hyde moved to Los Angeles to become an agent at Hill Nadell. Hyde represents a wide range of fiction and nonfiction, including young adult, genre fiction, graphic novels, narrative nonfiction, and […]
Every bit of pride her life doesn’t allow for her own sturdy beauty is poured into that chestnut coat, that black horsehair. One afternoon just three days before show-time, her father saunters into the house, swinging a large, rusty pair of shears. “Spring haircut…” he drawls, and she’s already out the door, running for the stable. …
My haunt my drinking place was there, lit by a moon I was not there. My intoxication personified, was there Not I. On the slippery slope to that bar, lips craving wine I was not there An eon of thirsts tottering, was there Not I. Maikada mai-kada thā chāñdnī thī maiñ na thā […]
The doctor noticed me fidgeting with my ears like a toddler, and asked if he could look at them. Yes, I told him, they had been bothering me, and I didn’t know why. After the examination, he asked if I had been through something traumatic recently— a breakup, or a loss of a job. Yes, […]
On the day of my father’s funeral, I wake up in a twin bed at his house. Liz is still asleep in the identical twin bed across the room. Dad and Penny bought these beds for Caroline and Cate, my nieces, but as usual, we make accommodations that negate the previous accommodations we’ve made for […]
I read Tara Ison’s first novel, A Child Out of Alcatraz, shortly after its publication in 1997. I’d spent a good chunk of my own adolescence in San Francisco living in Fort Mason while my father was stationed at Oakland Army Base, across the East Bay. At the time, Fort Mason was a smattering of […]
Twelve-year-old butter boys face the old Chinese woman they call Baboochka. Imagine: the eighty-year-old woman on their apartment’s shared front stoop, the silver moon caught in her tousled hair, her yellow sweater vest, her milky-white Velcro E-Z Steppers. She jostles grocery bags from one hip to the other as she digs in her pockets for keys. She grumbles about the checker at the vegetable market pocketing her change, about her arthritic fingers too weak to open jars but too strong for the wet lettuce bag, about the bus driver that did not hear her call out for a stop. …
© Éditions Inculte (2014) *or who shot him first or who shot him second or who is the first to have seen him dead or who is the one who in the helicopter sat on his body or who made it all up to have a story to tell Based on real facts and […]
She loved the theater despite its flaws: the faded carpets and cracked poster frames, its lack of a curtain call. She clutched broom and dustpan and strained to hear the happenings in the dark room. Sometimes people clapped at the end, and she could pretend winter had passed and spring had come and she was […]
It was Father’s Day and Maeve was in Friendly’s. After all this time, she was still a sucker for a Conehead. She and her father had spent countless hours here scarfing down the clown-faced sundae with whipped cream for hair and Reese’s Pieces for eyes when Maeve was a child growing up in Levittown. They […]
Gravedigger The song of the factory’s fans and the telephone that announces: life is so fragile like this state in which one writes. There’s a reason the trees shake at the bottom of this painting, as if somebody had opened a door through which the wind is expelled, house distorted by memory. But like a […]
This essay will have a dead daddy in it. There will be some other stuff in here, but it will mainly be about a dead daddy (mine). There are some who want to know the details. I am not one of those people. But I’m also not generally a reader of dead daddy stories. Add […]
Fady Joudah was born in Austin, Texas to Palestinian refugee parents. He spent time growing up in both Libya and Saudi Arabia, and returned to the United States to complete his medical education. He currently works as a professional physician in Houston, Texas. Joudah is the author of three original works: The Earth in the […]
[fiction] You’re walking home from Chester Park Elementary School, where you have the happiness of being in the sixth grade. As you’re passing the windowless flank of a multistory parking garage, a four-eyed classmate of yours named Dresner steps out of the doorway he’s been skulking in. —Check this out. The small volume he produces […]
As the credits roll on the theater screen, I check my phone. Eleven thirty-four p.m., still too many hours until morning. Dad left for work a few hours ago. He’s working nights at the hospital this week. I make a list in my mind of things I can do tonight to pass the time. Read. […]
Swallow / Swallowed / Swallowing swal·low | noun 1. a small oscine bird with a short bill, long pointed wings, & a deeply forked tail, which feeds on insects caught on the wing. swal·low | verb 1. to take or receive through the mouth & esophagus into the stomach. 2. to accept without question, protest, […]
That night, I’d just opened all the windows in the living room and collapsed on the sofa. My husband was sitting out on our stoop, listening to the oldies station too loud. I took my first sip of coffee when I heard Sammy talking to someone. “Yeah, go on in,” he said, and the screen […]
In December 2017, I met with Geeta Kothari to discuss her work as a writer and as the nonfiction editor of the Kenyon Review. In February of this year, Geeta’s collection, I Brake for Moose and Other Stories, was published; she was also the editor of Did My Mama Like to Dance?: And Other Stories […]
I met Margo Jefferson on a February afternoon in 2017, in New York City’s West Village. We sat in a café to discuss her latest book, Negroland, the winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. The memoir blends the author’s personal narrative with the history of America’s historical black elite. Jefferson, […]
“Tell your father not to stay out there in the chill; it’ll make him sick.” Actually, it was warm on the patio. The sun already hung low in the sky, but it was still two hours until dark. And the fence around the house shielded don Antonio Nemiña from the winds loaded with dust and […]
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