Our fiction winner is Max Steiner, for his piece “Grace Zeroes Out.” This year’s fiction judge was R.O. Kwon. Of Steiner’s story, she writes: “Grace Zeroes Out” has stayed with me like a haunting, the narrator’s voice hard to forget. The story is mostly structured as though in a series of triptychs, with each panel revealing…
It’s like how dogs get before an earthquake: pacing, whining, howling at the door. That’s me. Whole hours before the sky falls, I catch a sidelong view of the disaster, looming like rain clouds out of the north. I’ll be on the phone with my dad when it comes, the question I’m about to ask…
He was in love with someone else, but he couldn’t have her, and so he chose me. He lived with me for seven years and I had asked for nothing. Not even marriage. When you love a holy man, you know that God is in his heart, and you take what you are given. He…
Despite the early hour, JFK is a crucible of city odors and sticky pavement, but there’s only one flight to Seoul every day and they cannot miss it. His children loll like peeling plastic and complain in stereo, the girl bleating and her brother imitating her. If only they would put a sock in it, an English…
There was tons of organic produce, homemade lotions, ski racks on top of their cars, a whole language around vacations I had never heard before. Vats of spinach leaves and chickpeas and shredded carrots and compostable to-go containers that they heaped with hummus and bleeding beets. I emptied their trashcans and scrubbed the toilets of…
Translated from the Hungarian by Ildikó Noémi Nagy She only got to charge her phone every five days. There was someone standing at every wall outlet day and night, just like the appointed guards working in shifts beside the water bottles and tin cans. She fantasized about scrolling through Facebook, writing messages. A laughing emoji…
Goddamn. Lost again on this endless campus, with its Escher stairwells, its minarets, its Starbucks cafes, frisbee fields, its many quads—a regular hexadecagon of quads. I walk around a double-blind corner and find two empty loading docks and a row of empty industrial kitchens. I know I’m already late, but I can’t help myself. I…
The first thing Arnie did was to take out a pad of graph paper, apologize for reading to me from notes, and explain that he was doing so because he wanted to be sure to remember everything he’d planned to say. He even recited his apology from notes, saying he was aware we’d hardly seen each other…
In Sheboygan, toward the end of eighteen months spent stevedoring before disillusionment put him back on the boats, one of the men Tom worked alongside was crushed by a crate when a crane’s strapping gave way and the cargo had swung loose. Mose, the man’s name was, or what he was known by. “I’m Irish…
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