My sister Eileen always has to take things personally. Some might say she’s a narcissist. Like when that twelve-year-old girl got abducted in Salt Lake City some years ago, she went into a meltdown for days—trembling, crying, and ruining the third wedding of our other sister by staying outside in the car during the ceremony…

Alice inherited her family’s bungalow on Carter Lake after her father died. The man her parents bought the house from said the lake just appeared one rainy summer. But Alice doubted it. The lake never got any fuller, even after all the snow melted in the spring. Alice kept a pink inner tube tied to…

Margaret promised to give me dating advice because I was newly alone and shook like a frond every time I imagined starting from the beginning. For crying out loud, Margaret said, stop plucking your eyebrows off. I shut the little compact shaped like a kitten. Sorry, I said, I just want my face to look…

The Springer Spaniel stood in the middle of an empty residential street, a leash trailing behind it on the asphalt. Cate wondered if she was imagining things. But the dog was real, as real as the figure lying nearby in the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the road, hands on her chest, looking…

While “viciously skewering the politics of rebellion,” Lavinia Ludlow’s 2011 debut novel alt.punk offers some of the richest description to be found in the indie lit scene, and her pointed follow-up, Single Stroke Seven, opens with the possibility that much more than words are to be sliced and diced in Ludlow’s world. The California writer and musician has…

When I was twenty-five and Strane was fifty-five, we started talking about dying. That was the year he was diagnosed and, grayed and gaunt, he began to ask me things like: “how will you remember me?” and “are you at all angry with me because if you are I’d like to try to make amends”…

The first thing my uncle wanted to do when he got out of prison was go fishing. Go fishing. That was it. That was all we heard about. At barbecues, at the grocery, meetings with his parole officer. When he’d pass out drunk on the couch he’d mumble about the tide. Sometimes I’d grab my…

René Magritte, Le Retour de Flamme, 1943 That’s Fantômas the master has painted all right, but instead of a bloody knife, he’s holding a rose, and instead of a cold stare, his eyes are closed: less murderous schemer, more dreamer mid-daydream. Loulou the Pomeranian has read all 32 volumes of the series, but he likes…

Somnambunaut Hyper-sleep dreams are decades-long and luxurious, weaving through one another, tendrils knotting and untying, worming into those who dare travel deep space and lingering with me long after we arrived here in the Cygnus system, but soon we were so busy establishing a colony that years or else year-like tangles of time fell away…

The first time I almost died, I thought that what attacked me — what entranced me — had been something else, other than Death. And a strange something else at that. There I was, lying in bed, normal as always, and suddenly someone was pressing my chest, and I was carrying the world in my…

The rich are different from you and me. They worry more about taxes and wear nicer socks. My boyfriend has socks made of cashmere. I’ve never had a sweater made of cashmere. While making eggs in my boyfriend’s kitchen, I tell him that his pan’s non-stick coating is a known carcinogenic. “That’s not non-stick coating,”…

I got a message saying a lawyer wanted to contact me about an inheritance. It was the oldest spam on record. I ignored the first three. But they didn’t stop. Eventually, a lawyer, Mr. Hopewell, flew out from the capital to meet with me. “I assure you it is legit, Ms. Gannet. Now that the…