Fiction
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FictionThe Model Short Story
On "My Aeschylus” by Jim Shepard
Josh Weil
The best short stories are simultaneously the least understandable and most fully felt. They hits us with undeniable force, a concrete impact...
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Fiction
Joyride
David Abrams
Zeildorf had been on guard duty since 2 p.m. and he’d been paired with Suarez. That was the first bad thing. Suarez was known for his weak bladder—compared...
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Fiction
A Certainty
Rumaan Alam
When you get old, your skin goes soft. Like the pages of a library book, my grandmother’s hands, papery and cool. She’d take my hand in hers...
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Fiction
Amulets (a slideshow)
Roberta Allen
Eyes closed, Tara squeezed the amulet so tightly in her hand that she shrank the island of Taniqua, her home, to the size of a studio apartment in Manhattan
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Fiction
Power Ballads
Will Boast
It’s worse than dating, I told Kate. Every band you join, every job you take, it’s always the same: That first awkward jam, feeling each other...
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Fiction
Hexagon
Blake Butler
ConeWhite cone descended in sound blisterThere were the people having skin removed: to make the hood over our last eveningCone, White cone...
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Fiction
The End of My Life in New York
Peter Cameron
He doesn’t look at me, but furrows his brow and stares intently at the splayed pages, as if reading is very hard work. After enjoying this charade...
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Fiction
Monkey Brains
Elysha Chang
Look, this is how a heart works. The right atrium receives blood from the legs and arms and pours it into the right ventricle
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FictionThe Model Short Story
On "Bad Neighbors" by Edward P. Jones
Dana Johnson
Everyone knows Edward P. Jones’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Known World. Or at least they should. Regularly, I find myself talking...
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Fiction
Nailed
Alan Cheuse
After a restless night—one of many in a restless year–when he awoke several times feeling that he was on the verge of something, a cold...