Talk to me about red velvet, butter cream, German chocolate—it’s all I give a damn about. Some thick-framed, salad eating nobodies bring kids to a cakewalk. Fine. Whatever. Their loss. I

Never Trust an Ugly Unicorn

Never trust an ugly unicorn. They’re ugly for a reason and they don’t exist for a reason, although that might be a completely different reason. It is weird to

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We practiced being Endless for around an hour a day at first. Endless practice was like little pulley practice, like you were a little pulley for me and I was a little pulley for you. We

Day 1: Escaped labs today—power outage. (Years since our last repair; upset@SRSresearchers) In the sun, we’re some pretty fucked up “inventions.”

1: Role call (twelve of us left):

What follows is a conversation with Stacey Levine. I have wanted to talk to Levine about her amazing work for a long time, and have generally found myself too hypnotized by it to try to unpack it.

Doug Nufer is one of the foremost constraint-based writers in the United States. You could even say he's part of the definition of constrained writing. Seriously, type it into Wikipedia and see

My boss’s dealer was an Israeli guy named Amir who lived in Highland Park with his girlfriend and drove a Porsche. I met him one afternoon my first week working at Vintage Guitars. My boss Rick was

I’ll be the blonde-haired pony and you be the three-toed sloth on LSD. You be “altered.” You be “tripping balls.” You sit there, slowly drawing booger-like animals on a pad of paper with your three

The chemistry started in biology class. It was first period, and Roo had just gotten her first period. She could smell herself. Or she smelled something. It might have been the science room. Weird

My father, when he tried to quit smoking, used to suck on aquarium stones he sterilized at work. He claimed they worked better than candy or gum, which his doctor recommended. He’d slip a stone

In April, we ran our first ever "Hobart expert picks" for the 2011 baseball season. With the season just now over, we thought it would be fun to revisit our picks, and the season in general. Here

Its been quite a few years since I first met fellow Michigander Davy Rothbart. I, a bookseller in Seattle. He, a collector and presenter of found objects, the man behind FOUND MAGAZINE, a

Presume a bathroom and a row of yellow and hotly round fluorescents above the mirror. Presume a young woman with her hip to the linoleum, her temple to her wrist. She cleans with her free

You are a good-looking man. You know this because people tell you all the time, sometimes out of nowhere. You assume that people don’t get told that all the time unless it is deserved. You have

After the divorce, my uncle Nicolai became an amateur taxidermist. His first attempts were on roadkill, then the mice he took from the traps he set in the kitchen. He sent us pictures. My

This is the story about how I lost my husband.

Jamie had been in the hospital getting blood work and pre-op type treatment since finally,finally, he’d made it to the top of the

The Mayor, after several days of grieving, emerged from his hacienda at the hour that was once called lunch. He passed his guards, then slowly—laboriously—carried his voluminous frame through the streets, stopping at the square's one remaining café and ordering a well-cooked steak. The sun glared down from the cloudless sky and illuminated the Mayor, capturing him in full as he spread himself across a stool and held his knife and fork in a rehearsed display of indefatigable hope. There was still meat, he wanted the people to see. There was still a mayor. There was still a town, present and alive in that square.

Dark Sky is a fine new publisher whose books are strange and stunning and uncommonly good. Their most recent release, Ryan Ridge’s kinetic collection of short stories, Hunters & Gamblers,

The epigraph to Alex Shakar’s Luminarium could be a request or a demand; “Lead me from the unreal to the real.” For Fred Brounian, it is a plea. Fred finds himself in the middle of “a spiritual

I arrive at the party and there are about four people there—wait, there are ten more in the back room. Now there are six more at the door! The radiators are hissing out champagne. Everyone is

It is Sunday when the dogs come. The church bells ring and ring and my mother says to my sister like she does every week “wake up wake up we’re going to be late for church” and this is a joke,

I know a lot about the way a body grows in bed. I know a lot about sleep, which takes place inside the bed. I know about the dreams that swim around and the sweat that slips out. I like to watch

People think we’re in love, like goo-goo eyes and fingering, because we’re always together, Katie Jean and I. We’re always together, Katie Jean and I, because she has her mouth wired shut and I’m

The women were exceedingly beautiful that night. It did not move me to see them, even with their hair tossed back and asses sticking out. It did not make me feel violated, the way I wanted and

Kevin Wilson is the author of a story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth(Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), and a novel, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011). He lives and teaches in Sewanee, TN.Kevin Wilson is the author of a story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth(Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), and a novel, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011). He lives and teaches in Sewanee, TN.

At one a.m. a man loads mannequin parts into the trunk of an orange hatchback.

“I signed up for a thing online,” he tells me. “You put your name into this big database, along with a bunch