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…

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,…

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…

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,…

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.

On my fourteenth birthday, My Hunger stepped out of my body and sat beside me at my party. She looked me up and down before wrapping both hands around my slice of red velvet cake and whispered,  “Well, I heard they get the colour from dead beetles anyway.”  My mother denied this, looked right through…

Yep.  It’s not worth trying for. But if you don’t it just sits there.  Before we moved up to the foothills, I fished off trawlers in the San Francisco Bay. Slow months of rockfish and salmon. Then a week in early spring brought an apocalypse of herring. The low tide  white with sperm. Rocks and…

A novel in three paragraphs, Mark Haber’s Lesser Ruins is no beach read. In an all but unbroken 276-page stream of prose, Lesser Ruins probes the deepest crevices of the brain of its narrator, a middling community college professor and self-described “Montaignian” whose lifelong, and frequently destructive, obsession with the philosopher lurches him to the…

Zachary was a latecomer to the cottage on Fishers Drift. By the time he arrived as a child the place had weathered ninety summers; the rumble of foghorns had settled the angles of its wood where spiders lazed. He’d explore its corners, assemble stories from the atmosphere: shells in green ashtrays, the odor of rendered…

I read on the internet that soon, maybe next year, there’ll be a heatwave somewhere that will kill thousands of people, because it will last long and it will be hotter than ever, and people won’t be able to cool down or leave, because of power outages and internal combustion engines failing. The rest of…

And just like that, there’s a new vibe in the room. Sharp. A kind of after-energy, a post-concussive silence, just a whiff of sulfur and dust to hint at what’s happened.  What’s happened is this: we’ve just finished a story in English. Something about stones and the violence of luck. Or the luck of violence.…

for Jack Sheedy “Never chase the dog when she jumps the fence,” Richard’s father always said. “Don’t get attached. They’re for work, not for friends.” Richard rarely listened. + When the dog escaped the enclosure that morning, Richard followed, trailing her through old growth pine, the forest growing thick farther from home. Richard loved the…