It’s pointless to ask why, but we always ask it anyway. Why were people doing this? Why the crazed, senseless destruction? If you couldn’t secure a long life for yourself, why shorten someone else’s? What purpose did playing the spoiler serve? Asian women were getting cosmetic eye surgery so no one would think they might…

After we left Sylvia, Jimmy and I went to meet Harrigan at a dive bar in the Bowery. I’d heard of the place, an old-man bar so narrow that a drunk who tipped backwards in his barstool would hit the back wall at shoulder level instead of falling over completely. No matter what you ordered,…

Sylvia didn’t used to be this way. She had once — most of her life, in fact — been steadfastly positive. She was privileged, she would say humbly, and so she felt it was her mission to try to make the world a better place. She was so privileged she actually believed she would make…

“How’s this for an answer?” I said. The gun. That’s what I was looking for in the backpack. The man in the doorway was not the killer. I could see that right away. He held up his hands to show he was unarmed, but there was a half-amused, half-weary look on his face as he…

She was the only other Lao Baby I’d met, both of us having ended up in New York adopted by do-gooder types, me a middle-aged ethical culturalist on the Upper West Side, Maggie a family of blue-collar Baptists in Queens. As soon as we knew each other, we became friends, different as we were, finding…

The grenade fell in the middle of the floor. At least I assume it did, but at that point Jimmy and I had burst from the building into the parking lot out back. Miracle of miracles, a heavy-duty dumpster stood right in our path. I seized Jimmy’s arm and threw us both inside. Would that…

Going incognito is easier than you think. First you have to cut your hair, which is probably the hardest part. You’ve always had long hair — at least since you were nine or ten, anyway. Sylvia always wanted to cut it short because she said she thought you looked so cute with short hair, or…

Of all the things people thought would bring the world to an end — incurable diseases, unstoppable weapons, total environmental catastrophe — no one imagined that our sheer will to keep on living was what would do us in. The immortality gene had been discovered. At least that’s what the buzz was for a while,…

My very first story was published in The Literary Review in 1989, accepted by Auberon Waugh, and I still have his acceptance letter, handwritten with fountain pen. Waugh had been appointed editor by its new owner, ‘flamboyant’ (i.e. rich) Naim Atallah, who had previously bought the publishing house Quartet in 1976, four years after its…

Comma Press is a Manchester-based press founded, and funded, expressly to publish short fiction, which it does in the form of both full collections and series of anthologies. The series include one of ‘City’ anthologies — each devoted to a single British, European or Eastern city — and one of spectra of new and established…