Fiction | The Center for Fiction

Power Ballads

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...

ConeWhite cone descended in sound blisterThere were the people having skin removed: to make the hood over our last eveningCone, White cone...

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...

Look, this is how a heart works. The right atrium receives blood from the legs and arms and pours it into the right ventricle

Everyone knows Edward P. Jones’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Known World. Or at least they should. Regularly, I find myself talking...

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...

Dr. Yu’s office was festooned with dangling models of vertebrae in various sizes, mostly human in scale, some incredibly tiny

Frances was fifty-nine and Peanut was twenty-five, and because of this they were often distracted by the looks of others in public

In any Gallant story, life or reality is curious, daunting, often frustrating, sad or tragic. And, she’s funny, too, in her way

We didn’t pay attention to the sirens. Our northern New Jersey town is large enough that car accidents, fires, and petty crimes happen every...