Fiction

This is how the day begins: Badly. Bleary and bloated and many other b-words. There’s vomit on the blanket and he’s not sure whose. Maybe the dog, Barkley? A bottle on the nightstand, a butt in the tray with a dead two-inch ash. The boiler is broken again, the shower bitterly cold. The driveway? Blocked—call…

When Adam "Drew" Drewshevsky, a.k.a. Dickie DeLong, returned to his hometown of Sherman, Ohio, his old friend Barry Borkowski took him out for a beer at Don"s Underworld and raised a glass to the Prince of Porn. There was truth to the title: In the past decade, Drew had made more than three hundred erotic…

When Paul Loy was ten years old, watching the movers unload the Allied Van Lines truck at his family’s new house in upstate New York, all the white kids on Ableman Avenue materialized. When his parents told him he’d have to learn to get along, even though he didn’t understand the concept of passing, that…

a novel excerpt Well OK, let’s see: start with the climactic moment and my father wearing his regulation State Trooper iridescent mirror shades so I could see a pair of shrunken images of myself but not his eyes and he stood there in the marl-paved parking lot beside his truck with the red light still…

A year after my father was called before the McCarthy subcommittee, the acne began to appear, and nothing I did prevented the blotches from rising and spreading like a small red army over my cheeks and chin. I tried calamine, witch hazel, all seven lotions from the pharmacy on Sixth Avenue, and finally a paste…

Katya is searching for her glasses. They were just here. One minute ago, on the counter, the big brown glasses. Without them, everything is waxy. She lays her hand on the cool Formica and makes a brushing motion. Keys, coffee mug, phone book. Two different pens. Why are there so many pens? She has never…

They’d been led to our land. The woman, Meredith, was far along in her pregnancy, and the coincidence of her name being close to “Mary” struck me, no place to lay their heads as they awaited the birth of their child. We-I-owned two hundred acres, cut out of the red rock along the Wyoming-Colorado border….

The BLM auction took place at the county fair. In the corner of the world stood five sorry-ass enclosures with about twenty or thirty animals inside—mostly horses, but then a few burros, too, carted over from Yuma. It would be my horse, technically. I was just going to keep it at the Arizona School for…

The summer school boys wore coats and ties, even in the heat. They were the irreverent children of suburban lawyers, of diplomats, of hopeful scientists working in the big federally funded labs outside of the city. When their parents dropped them off at the top of the school’s long drive, the boys’ required coats were…