“The thing is,” he said, “now that I’ve stopped drinking, I don’t want to be a bore. At parties, you know.”

“You’re not boring, Grandpa,” I said. He didn’t go to parties, either.

“The thing

In the summer that followed Danny's sophomore year at U-High, he took Bridget to a White Sox game. He knocked at her door on a Sunday morning with a baseball glove in each hand and a White Sox

I met Billy Lombardo in the summer of 2007 on a sun drenched patch of grass under the Blue Ridge Mountains in Asheville, N.C. We had both just survived our first "Meet and Greet" at Warren Wilson

I did some fact-checking after the wedding. I bet you thought I never would, but I did. And you know what I found out? You were never an ace reliever in the Orioles' farm system, like I overheard

Pop loved two things, but I inherited his affection for one of those only. He read me bedtime stories during the off-season. The last one always came the night before he left for Spring Training.

I enjoy stealing. It's just as simple as that.
Jane's Addiction, "Been Caught Stealing"

Bear with me here: I don't know shit about baseball. I honestly don't think I could name a single

She woke up as excited as she had twenty years ago on a St. Patrick's Day morning in her childhood home, despite the fact that everything around her was unfamiliar, despite the fact that her hotel

She is not a warthog in the zoo. She travels with a whip and rope through space and time. She is not a girl but feels like one. She understands the principles of Schrödinger and Heisenberg,

My wife says I'm too old for rollercoasters. Maybe she's right. I'm twenty-five, I'm balding, and I have a weak beard. But I still want to go to Libertyland.

"You'll buy a funnel cake,"

Outside on his porch was an indoor sofa. But he kept the lawn mowed. Early in the morning when the grass was still too wet — there he was, limping behind the mower, cursing God and us when it

Amy: Mattox, thank you for chatting with me about your new (and first) novel, Sometimes We're Always Real Same-Same. You've had great press (Publisher's Weekly, New York Times Sunday Book

A few months ago (i.e. in August), Michael Kimball guest-edited Everyday Genius for a month (and, actually, he was kicking so much ass, it extended into much of, if not all, of September as

A Conversation with Laird Hunt (cont'd)

(read part one of the interview here)

THE REIFICATION OF FICTION
 

Ruland: When last we talked, you recommended some

I was thinking about your book and its readers, and I thought about how there are three audiences. One is very large: people who have never met you. The second is very small: people who have known

Fish Stories

This friend of mine, Greg, he's always quitting smoking. He breaks his cigarettes in half, or runs them under the tap, or both, so he can't light up. He hides all his matches. And

She finds me in the backyard, behind the fence. I'm not crying because I've never been a child who cries. Instead I stare at the way the fence posts overlap, rotting, green and all worn down smooth

The Night Sky

Looking west over the ocean, watching the yellow crescent moon dip behind the low strip of fog off the coast. It disappeared and returned several times, as the fog bank in its

Unfortunately, Chin fed her sock puppets too many vegetables. She didn't always feed them in front of me, but the smell of steamed broccoli and half-empty bowls of it greeted me in our dorm suite

Nancy Lish was a simple woman with one simple obsession: she wanted to be a contestant on the game show Disk & Ladder. Every week she sent her postcard to the host, Peter Stimer, and at last,

A Conversation with Laird Hunt

A criminal operative helps a woman fill her shelves with mundane objects. A gentleman with psychic powers reflects on the days before his wife went insane. A

The man is older than the woman, but not by much. They're out for a stroll in the park, taking in the sunshine and fresh air. "Look at that," says the man, pointing at the mud. The man crouches

Not more than two steps in and Ali had the Sadness Museum exhibit sized up.

Her words, This exhibit is sad, sad, sad.

I tried to look on the bright side. My words, At least it's

One of the things that most fans don't know about NBA superstars, is that we like to meet in the off season and fight to the death. So, this past Saturday, I called LeBron James while I was

(Editor's note: this month, I asked a former Warren Wilson classmate of mine, Anna Clark, to – in a virtual setting – sit down with two other former classmates on the occasion of the publication of

A few minutes till closing on a Friday, a kid still in the library, no parent with him, too cold out for him to walk home if he lives any distance away, no coat, only a thin jacket over his shirt.