". . . whence a whole world emerges."—Cavafy A friend of mine finds out from her agent (her editor never calls) that her book, her fourth, has been dropped from her publisher’s catalogue. The work is too difficult. A writer I know is told, "How about putting in some dogs? People love it when…
Bruno came up to the girl at the bar and she was already talking halfway out of one side of her mouth while, he knew it, looking at him with one eye at least through the smoke she dropped everywhere from the chatted cigarette and the pointed nails, and he knew it was all falling…
The vigor and accomplishment of contemporary American literature is nowhere more easily appreciated than in the journals and quarterlies that labor doggedly, and for the most part thanklessly, to display both the quantity and quality of the enterprise. The quantity and quality of those journals and quarterlies themselves is both staggering and delightful, and the…
MASTHEAD Guest Editor Amy Bloom Editor Don Lee Managing Editor Gregg Rosenblum Poetry Editor David Daniel Associate Fiction Editor Maryanne O’Hara Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O’Malley Assistant Fiction Editor: Jay Baron Nicorvo. Editorial Assistants: Rachael T. Brown and Emily Carlson. Bookshelf Advisors: Fred Leebron and Cate Marvin. Proofreader: Megan Weireter. Fiction Readers:…
Here are boys, still weak. When they speak snow falls from their lips. Pale of hand and cheek, the motors that whirred in their chests have failed. + Their new city—buildings like a scrim a god unfurled for them so it waves in the wind. + Lovely, strange, and chill. The boys are…
The taxi pulled to a stop in front of a brownstone whose wrought-iron gate looked oddly familiar. It was a rainy Sunday evening. The last traces of light hung morosely in the sky, illuminating rows of brownstones whose façades were uniformly lifeless, as though everyone inside were hiding, or away. Jason fumbled with his…
more awards Our congratulations to the following writers, whose work has been selected for these anthologies: Best Stories—Jill McCorkle’s "Intervention," from the Fall 2003 issue edited by Alice Hoffman, will be included in The Best American Short Stories 2004. The anthology is due out this October from Houghton Mifflin, with Lorrie Moore as the guest…
When I was a Jersey girl I hid my Jersey ways. Predictable as milk, I paled predictably when New Yorkers said: Jersey? and they were right. They despised my yellow Jersey plates, my Garden State cockeyed, solipsistic, anesthetized take on pig farming in that isolate, Secaucus, my bowling with extended family at the Elizabeth Lanes—…
Louis liked the paddle more than the man who swung it. He respected the instruction, the ritual, the organization of his thoughts when the paddle struck its target. He enjoyed the stinging clarity, the expedient way the paddle transmitted its message. "You’re a bad boy, aren’t you? You’re Daddy’s little pig," the man with…
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