August 1, 2007 | Interview
An Interview with Roy Kesey
Sean Carman
Roy Kesey's best stories manage to be hilarious and poignant, absurd and intelligent, amusing but still close to the heart. And like all great writers, Roy somehow makes this balancing act look
August 1, 2007 | Fiction
Cabin Fever
Paul Silverman
She was what his father, who had a Betty Grable calendar in the garage, used to call a bleached blonde, and she was kind of daffy-taffy in that old Hollywood way. Face all smooth and creamsicle
August 1, 2007 | Fiction
The Dead Walk Backwards
Steve Finbow
The earth is deep brown and peppered with crows. Sorry-looking cows nuzzle the frozen refuge. Two mongrel dogs, skinny, tentative, sniff at my backside. Submerged concrete -- cuboid and rectangular
August 1, 2007 | Fiction
Crimes of the Post-Divorce Era
Diane D. Gillette
Gerry let out a loud belch and tried unsuccessfully to focus on Albert.
"I've got to get her back. I miss her so much."
There were tears in Gerry's eyes and Albert felt his stomach clench,
An Interview with Jeffrey Brown
Tom McHenry
Jeffrey Brown entered the comics world with three intimate autobiographical graphic novels about failed relationships. Then a comic about a superhero with a giant head. Then one about cats. And
Agnes and Ned
Jonny Diamond
She had death in her hands, in her heart, in the americ tang of her angry sweat: she was jealous of a piece of bread. It was a dark, trunk-thick loaf of Polish bread, and Agnes could think of
Four Sieges
Erin Fitzgerald
I.
Deirdre doesn't talk to Nicole anymore, but she thinks she does. Last winter, six months went by with neither one of them saying anything. Right around Memorial Day, Deirdre asked if she
Nine Paragraphs about the Future (In Jacksonville, Florida)
William Peterson
1. Ionization
In a city where everything feels a bit belated, where the clever ones agonize over looming hindsight, our advertising company accelerated toward modernity, at last, on February
Unpublished Manuscript #36
Joe Clifford
Kitty peeled dead flies off the screen. She squinted in the direction of the boatyard. "No boats today," she muttered to herself.
A late season heat wave had brought a constant haze that made
Redefining All-You-Can-Eat: Our 14 Hour Challenge to Ryan's Steakhouse
Blake Butler
It is 1:38 pm the day after the event and the best way I can think of to describe the way I feel is: food hangover. I'm dressed in the loosest clothing I own with a throbbing, deep-seated headache
An Interview with Pia Ehrhardt
Matthew Simmons
Very soon, a book named Famous Fathers will appear on bookshelves. It's by the astonishing Pia Ehrhardt.
This is very exciting.
I have been a fan of Ehrhardt's subdued, gorgeous fiction for
Liberating Crabapples
Richard Osgood
Leonard Crank is an ass. He's a beer-in-a-can-drinking, White-Owl-cigar-smoking, wife-beater-wearing, greasy-haired slug. He is also my next-door neighbor. As for me, well, I have always been the
The Cousinfucker
Litsa Dremousis
"Rita, I know you've slept with one of your cousins," Mom told me this morning at brunch.
My stomach kicked. I stopped chewing but couldn't swallow.
"Here, drink some juice," she said and
It's About Time
Martin Dodd
He sits in his chair, absently running his fingers through his thinning white hair. She hunches on the sofa, quivering, holding a shredded tissue in one hand and rubbing warmth into her forearm
Snakes & Ladders
Michael Loughrey
A ticket to watch Cindy do her striptease cost a dollar and an ice cream.
Terms and conditions of business were:
1) The dollar could be paid as a bill or in loose change, but currency from
An Interview with Ben Greenman
Matthew Simmons
The following is an email conversation I had with Ben Greenman, an editor at The New Yorker and the author of Superbad (McSweeney's) andSuperworse (Soft Skull Press). His new book, A Circle Is
Proofreader
Jeff Landon
1
My father’s ashes clumped on the way to Smith Mountain Lake—it was probably the humidity. We had transferred his ashes from the urn because my mother thought the urn was ostentatious. We had
Lake-Effect Snow
Sean Mills
The next morning, you get a call from the Days Inn Akron South and he tells you he’s been in an accident. He is unhurt but crying into your answering machine, saying that he didn’t want to call you
Overhanded
Amy Minton
He smokes overhanded like a soldier. She notices that right away. He's hiding the glowing ember in the cup of his hand just like he's been taught to do. Her grandfather once told her that the
Daisuke Matsuzaka's Other Legendary Talents
Christopher Monks
“Matsuzaka’s pitching motion is an elegant haiku, beauty captured in three parts separated by two pauses that he varies from pitch to pitch. He swings his hands over his head, pauses, lowers his
Me and the Boy 5-18-06
F. John Sharp
Night game
raining on and off
seats in right field
peanuts, nachos, hot dogs
souvenir cap
in fancy modern non-classic design
Strolling
to center field to peer over the
Sandy Koufax 1964
Litsa Dremousis
Mark took a pencil out of his royal blue gym bag. He hunted for a scrap of notebook paper, something to write on, but all he could find was a half-eaten tuna fish and potato chip sandwich, a
And It's Outta Here
Caryn Rose
It's the middle of May, and the temperature has leveled off at a balmy 42 degrees at 7:30 p.m . This is why there were only about 15-20 people sitting in Section 12 -- or Section 14, or Section 22,
An Interview with Kevin Sampsell
Savannah Guz
Founder of Future Tense Books, Kevin Sampsell has helped a multitude of writers get their start and has become an influential literary personality in his own right. Hobart caught up with Sampsell
First Person, Unreliable
Ian F. King
Outside the apartment I'm leaving, in a spread out triangle of park benches on an oversized traffic island lined around the outside with waist-high shrubs, there's a vagrant man, grayed and out of
Scenes from the Elephant Garden
J. R. Salling
Eadweard Muybridge invented the photographic process called stop-motion photography, his most famous a series of stills illustrating a horse at full speed. My memories of our first house near
For Everything Else there is Mastercard
Tadzio Yuko
The man wiped his mouth with a silk handkerchief embroidered with his initials ($75.- a piece). He had just finished his meal of raw sea scallop carpaccio drizzled with white truffle oil and
Banned from the Hospice
Stefani Nellen
That day, when the nurses hugged her and welcomed her to the hospice, it all came together. Silke belonged here. She excelled in dying.
She sat up in bed all day, her fingers folded on her