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Texas: The Great Theft

Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft is a sprawling novel, immense in scope despite its limited setting on the Texas-Mexico border, in the towns of Brownsville (Brunveille) and Matamoros (Matasanchez). Boullosa sometimes gives the absurd impression that this is a parsimonious narrative. In fact the breadth of life on offer here is immense. The novel…

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Recent posts

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    I had to agree not to get pregnant. I told Vick Clover, the recruiter, that I didn’t intend to have sex with anyone any time soon, but that didn’t matter. As “a woman of childbearing potential,” I had to produce a negative hGG serum test to participate in a Phase 1 drug trial. Then, I…


  • An Interview with Anu Kandikuppa

    Anu Kandikuppa’s debut story collection, The Confines (Veliz Books, 2025) takes a grimly absurd look at marriage, reimagining love, attraction, and the social conventions that bind human beings. In stories set in India and the United States, eccentric characters struggle to express themselves—through binge eating, hypochondria, yelling at a corpse, and even through bird poop. They…


  • Soft Burial

    In Fang Fang’s letter to readers at the end of Soft Burial, she defines the meaning of her novel’s title as the act of being “put into the earth without a coffin,” such that “one’s body [is] placed directly into the dirt.” Such a departure, with its implication of suffering in the life to come,…


  • Gloves

    I remember when I first started wearing gloves. My mother gave me a “training” pair. I was hesitant, nervous, and shoving my knuckles into that small space felt so claustrophobic I began to cry. “You’ll get used to it soon enough,” she said, but as my fingers began to feel dewy with the constant shelter…


  • The Visitor

    The experience of a young adult returning home after a long absence is not always a simple one. Warm feelings of nostalgia mingle with darker memories—the ones childhood so expertly preserves. Compounding the interior turmoil is the exhausting daily task of presenting a new self to those who persist in seeing only the former child…


  • Don’t Take This the Wrong Way

    Resist the temptation to employ metafictional techniques to mock your partner’s propensity for sending the story back to you after having added nothing more than a few paragraphs examining the origin of a single word or phrase.


  • Wednesday, After School

    The soles of our sneakers pounded years of sodden leaves. The rubber of Reeboks skidded on dew the sun never burned up deep in the shady woods. We heard them behind us laughing. The redhead the loudest, screeching and puffing.  Margaret, Wendy, and I knew where to go. The woods were filled with abandoned tree…


  • An interview with Avitus B. Carle

    These Worn Bodies (Moon City Press, Nov. 1, 2024) by Avitus B. Carle is collection of flash fiction that is wondrous in its form and its imagination. Bodies are deconstructed to discrete parts (boobs! orgasms!) or made of paper or popcorn. Flies are elevated to main characters. Agency is for everyone. Both societal and genre…


  • Command Performance

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  • The Babysitter’s Crush

    He was four. His babysitter was fourteen. She glowed and lifted him into a glowing happiness where it was warm and safe. When he turned five, she turned fifteen, and the difference was negligible; he was still in love, she was still beautiful. The house glowed in the afternoons when they watched television together waiting…