In “Men and Women Like Him” (Guernica), Amber Sparks explores dark tourism from the perspective of a time traveling tour guide who must ensure that historical tragedies don’t change—even when those tragedies become personal.Sparks drops us right into scene in the first couple paragraphs, letting the action and scenario reveal much of the situation at…
In “The Matchmaker” (James Franco Review), Karen Palmer stays tight to her characters’ moment-by-moment experiences, which helps the potentially polarizing events of the story elude simple definitions. What’s revealed is the tragedy of a mental institution unable to adequately serve the population it’s responsible for. In the opening few paragraphs, we discover that the first…
In these modern times, we have greater access to the news of the wide world than ever before. In the flash fiction piece “Beach Boys” (decomp), Michelle Meyers explores two twins who tried their best to avoid the headlines of their times, only to be drawn in despite their efforts. Meyers starts the twins’ journey…
Patients with terminal conditions face many difficulties outside of the symptoms themself. In “Brought to Shore” (SmokeLong Quarterly), Nicholas Olson explores a family struggling through the emotional realities of a parent living on borrowed time. Olson opens the story with a memory of a camping trip with the narrator’s unnamed father and brother. “When I…
Godzilla has been a mainstay in popular culture since the 1950s, when he was conceived as a metaphor for the nuclear age and the new level of mass destruction introduced. Josiah Meints, in the story “In Which Godzilla Questions Where His Life Is Going” (The Collapsar) reimagines the famous monster suffering from the ills of…
Proust famously stated, “The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.” In “Souvenir Button,” Rosalyn Drexler (A Public Space) explores paradises rendered, imagined, inhabited, and lost. Drexler opens the story with the unnamed narrator receiving a souvenir button made for her by an artist hanging out at the playwright Tom O’Horgan’s famous Greenwich…
The relationship between sports and war in American culture is deep; tune in any given Sunday and you’ll find fighter jets flying over the stadium and football jerseys designed with camo. In “How Héctor Vanquished the Greeks” (Harvard Review), George Choundas explores the kinship between war and sport through a youth soccer game woven into…
In the summer of 1895, Linnie Rogers became the first woman to ascend Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, by climbing up a precarious, 350-foot wooden ladder made of stakes driven into a crack running up the rock formation’s side. In Holly Wendt’s “The Rogers Ladder,” (Gulf Stream) the national monument and this minor historical event take…
In Marie-Helene Bertino’s “Edna in Rain” (reviewed in February), the narrator’s ex-lovers are literally raining from the sky, leaving her to deal with the surprising consequences. In Ling Ma’s “Los Angeles” (Granta), the narrator has similar problems with past lovers, leading to a wild exploration of memory’s hold on the present. In the first paragraph,…
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