May 23, 2024 | Fiction
EXCERPT FROM American Narcissus - "Free Shit"
Chandler Morrison
She was a kid, he reasoned. She’d grow out of her ridiculous ideology. It wasn’t worth a confrontation.
May 22, 2024 | Interview
CATS NEED VALIDATION: KATE AXELROD INTERVIEWED BY SAM AXELROD
Sam Axelrod
Kate Axelrod’s new book of stories, How to Get Along Without Me, is, to quote the jacket copy, “a collection that summons the perversity and poignance of twentysomething dating lives from a bracingly
May 21, 2024 | Fiction
AGORAPHOBIA: Summer, 1990 & Winter, 2020
Elizabeth Ellen
It is impossible to determine merely by looking how recently a modern American woman has been vaginally penetrated or rectally sodomized. One can never trust scientific data on matters such as how often a modern American woman is made love to in [enter current year].
May 21, 2024 | Interview
Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman on their novel Trust & Safety
Anna Dorn
Can you each pick two words to describe your book?
Laura: Escapist fantasy
Eve: The first thing that came to mind for me was: “Oh, god.”
The Black River
Sean Tanner
I could hear the Essex lads cooing and whispering to her, telling her that it would be okay
EXIT STRATEGY
Jonathan Doyle
Her eyes looked up and zeroed in on Marina’s Muses. On the women floating through the air. No cares. Just an angel dancing in the blue heavens.
A Study in Time Lapse: Alphabetical Diaries, Memory, and Mundanity
Lennie Roeber-Tsiongas
Sheila Heti has a bad memory. She’s sitting on the stage of the Mark Taper Auditorium in the Los Angeles Central Library, wearing a velvet jumpsuit with gold tendrils and black lace tights. Heti tells
Honor Levy on Her First Book
Anna Dorn
The black Mr. Sketch marker, Cucumber JUUL pods, Dr Pepper Lip Smacker, spirit duplicator, soggy sugary cereal milk mush, pink rubber pencil shavings, burning toast stroke, pumpkin spice scented hand sanitizer.
Excerpt from PERFUME & PAIN
Anna Dorn
I eat a big salad and watch Kim and Kourtney eat big salads on a ten-year-old episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
Noble sauvage
Leya Ivanov
U were the only Turk i knew, and also the only Turk my parents liked. they never let me walk around the fountains at night even though it’s the only place in Sofia with streetlights after two a.m. b/c
Swan Singing
Sarah Teresa Cook
I am seated at a small brown desk from IKEA, crafting a love letter.
See how the heart spills right out of me? Spills and spills, ink everywhere. This desk is too small.
Picture it: Me, a
The Beautiful Ones
Thomas Heise
A year after my wife Ada disappeared, I started attending the book club.
sentez-moi
Yasemin Kopmaz
During the first rehearsal, her troupe members burn her thighs with incense sticks. It’s not hazing, it’s just how they bond.
The King of Video Poker
Paolo Iacovelli
Arnold Palmer died today. The news anchor announces it on the TV hanging in the corner as I’m dealt a pair of 9’s at a Jacks or Better machine. Suddenly it doesn’t matter that the news anchor
The Paddler
Michael Robert Liska
A drunk woman invites me into her canoe. It isn’t really her canoe; it belongs to a sullen man sitting by a campfire. I had wandered through the woods from my own campsite, looking for beer, and found
Masturbation Anxiety
Hayli May Cox
(Moaning loudly)
(Bed creaking)
(Crying in Italian)
Breast Proof
Christie Tate
Given: A girl-body will grow breasts during puberty.
Given: Girls will absorb many different messages about breasts in their lifetime.
Given: Breasts are a source of shame and
Camping
Haley Beecher
I desperately wanted to have a breakdown in someone's arms.
White Musk And Crack
Marisa Cadena
The cop and strip club security guard had climbed onto the roof from outside the building and were trying to get in through the locked laundry room window. Claire let them in.
Mattress
Mona Kirschner
It took three of us to get a king size mattress stuffed into the tiny service elevator, pushing our shoulders into it so it would finally give and bend. It sprung out when the doors opened, like a
Parallel Brother
Mali Khan
Of course, I thought about these uncles. Even WhatsApp-d some of them when I remembered.
Wigs
Mona Kirschner
Long before I wore wigs to punish the men who had punished me, I wore them to channel Selma Blair. I was thirteen, my flat chest leaned over the bathroom sink. We were both brunettes, but that’s
UNDER A VEHEMENT SKY: A REVIEW OF SEAN KILPATRICK’S ‘TANTRUMS’
David Kuhnlein
To a degree rarely rivaled, Sean Kilpatrick lives for words. Tantrums is a testament to the last twenty years of his life, and includes absolutely batshit scripts, joyfully brutal fiction, and
Two Drinks in at the Oyster Bar
Hayden Church
“Have you tried hookers?
Church? God? Your dead
mother? Pills? Coke? Crack?”




