It happened the way things these days do: a text from my mother with a link to Facebook. The Washington County Sheriff’s Department posted a missing person’s notice. A face familiar at once, but from memories I would’ve thought atrophied completely by now…

“Did you know there is always a dead wasp hidden inside a fig?” Vera asks, sinking her teeth into the pink and green flesh. I’m sure it’s a myth but won’t say so. This summer we’re exploring sex with the enthusiasm a dedicated entomologist affords a newly discovered species. Sex is a red splash of…

Every day when we wake up in Hazel’s bed, our phones let out a collective beep in symphony. It is always the same message: Excessive Heat Warning. Degrees of up to 100 reported across the valley, cooling centers available around the city. Do not go outside. Do not stand in direct sunlight. If you do…

Writing for N+1, the novelist Raven Leilani has recently observed that while grief resists containment, fiction generally demands it. In her view, a story is a series of exclusions, and storytelling mainly involves decisions about what and does not belong in the story’s container. Softie, a debut collection by Megan Howell, confronts readers with stories…

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…

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…