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Boy Practice

There are two boys in an attic, and one boy has a knife. It’s a little one, not much longer than either boy’s pinky. The boy with the knife has short black hair and thick glasses. He is pointing the knife at the short boy, his long blond hair and thin glasses.  It might not…

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Recent posts

  • We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine

    At once a dystopian bildungsroman, a science fiction epic spanning millennia, and a philosophical thought experiment grappling with the ethics of AI, gene editing, and other burgeoning technologies, Deni Ellis Béchard’s We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine considers the meaning of human existence in a future when problems such as mortality, pain, scarcity, and…


  • Continuous Revolution

    Summer, 1965. A white-hot, endless afternoon. Narrow alleyways flanked by ramshackle sheds; cicadas screech nonstop, near, far, everywhere. We stir awake from our naps, sweat imprinting our contours on bamboo sleeping mats. We fan ourselves with palm leaf fans, gulp water still cool from the clay jug as tall as our shoulders. Bored, we test…


  • An interview with Mary Troy

    Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Mary Troy recently released her sixth book, In the Sky Lord, a collection of ten stories that slice open the beating heart of the Midwest to reveal a world in which characters work to understand the paradox of modern community. In language that sings with both compassion and…


  • Thunderhead

    With Thunderhead, her third novel, Miranda Darling rewrites Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) for contemporary readers, exchanging the genteel drawing rooms of post-WWI London for contemporary suburbia’s gleaming middle-class kitchens stocked with pricey appliances and organic produce. At the story’s heart is Winona Dalloway, a charmingly anxiety-ridden thirty-something who writes romance novels in harried spurts…


  • More of You

    There are people who can turn into houses, and my mother is one of them. Her story goes like this. She was seeing her sibling for the first time in five years. My mother, the house, sat on a little grassy perch by the beach, where spiral shells crawled ashore and the children built sandcastles,…


  • Diversity Quota

    The ten short stories in Ranjan Adiga’s Diversity Quota deliver a full range of rich and complicated human emotion. Like some of his characters, Adiga is a Nepali immigrant to the United States, but these are not simply immigrants’ tales. These layered and nuanced stories range broadly. Adiga’s characters encounter unexpected setbacks, become enmeshed in…


  • The Way You Want to Be Loved

    In Aruni Kashyap’s collection of thirteen short stories, The Way You Want to Be Loved, characters tied to Assam confront familial guilt, racism, homophobia, and the isolation endured by young people living far from home. As the stories cross oceans and time periods, Kashyap keeps readers engaged with his impeccably developed characters as they forge…


  • On The Air

    David Zimmer felt like he lived at the end of the line, at the bottom of the barrel, or at a frequency so low that it could only be heard by whales. Being the last name on any roll or list was just part of it. What festered was a feeling of being left out,…


  • Recommended Reading 2024

    Our editors share a few of their most memorable books of the year


  • Sayonara LA

    Lena’s nephew has a meltdown just as they are sitting down for the Christmas meal. His screeches are a detonated bomb, obliterating all the rosiness and holiday cheer with the sonar equivalent of blinding white light.