Literary short stories by established and emerging writersExcerpts:
Peter Parsons
No One There, No One to Talk to, Nothing to Say
I feel I have to bless everyone else I know who has died, and I start naming grandparents, relatives, friends, and how about those who haven't died.
Alicia Oltuski
Let's Take It from the Top
"Don't call Dom," my father said to me. I wished he hadn't. Dom had known what to do the time Dad forgot how to swallow for two days, and I suspected she would have known what to do here.
George Makana Clark
Pluto
Some people complain that snoring keeps them awake, but there's a rhythm to it, a repetition that says, I trust you, I trust you with my life.
Tori Malcangio
Donna of Mesker Park Zoo
Brokaw knows his parents went to bed on November 1 and didn't wake up on November 2. They both stopped breathing because sometimes the gorillas won't mate and sometimes the turnstiles don't work and that's that.
Katherine Easer
Parade of Cats
Before he met me, Brandon thought Taiwanese people spoke Thai, and all Asians looked alike. He had never dated anyone who wasn't Aryan, though this wasn't by design.
Courtney Knowlton
Mean Blonde Ponytail Girl
I hoped that I could one day do something so generous for my children, but there was a good chance that we'd never be able to. We were teachers, and I was a spender.
Cady Vishniac
Remainders
Our shul was a permissive environment, so reasonable and rule free we had trouble thinking up ways to rebel.
Dan Murphy
In Miniature
Let's warp speed to feeling okay, okay? Let's get straight back to feeling ... anything other than this.
Jennifer Wortman
Love You. Bye.
But it could happen, I say. By your own admission, you never know. She stares at me, her dark eyes darkening. I'm her longtime depressive friend. Why am I on the side of hope?
Nikole Beckwith
The Beginning
And then the emergency siren stopped. It was meant to sound three short bursts to punctuate safety, as if to say "The End," but the bursts never came. Just silence.
Valeria Luiselli
Interview by David Naimon
That is what it means, in fact, to translate. It comes from the Latin translatio, which means to move something, to carry it over, to transfer it, to take it on a trip from A to B. I think of translation in those terms. I think of many practices as forms of translation.
Eric Boehling Lewis
Blue Ridge
Years ago your grandmother told you that the happiest period in her life had slid by, disguised as tedium. Only after the Soviet police killed her husband did she realize she'd been living in a kind of heaven.
Oguz Dinc
The Hurricane
We are way behind Americans when it comes to disaster preparation, maybe because we are ahead in fatalism.
Peter Parsons was born in the Philippines and worked as a newspaperman and then a printer in Southern California. He lives in the Philippines and in Spain.
Alicia Oltuski's work has appeared in Tin House, Narrative, Catapult, and others. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BA and MA from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught writing at various venues.
George Makana Clark is the author of the novel The Raw Man and the story collection The Small Bees' Honey. His stories have appeared in The Granta Book of the African Short Story, Ecotone, the Georgia Review, Glimmer Train, Granta, Massachusetts Review, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2006, the Southern Review, Tin House, Transition Magazine, Zoetrope: All Story, and Wasafiri. Born in Rhodesia, he lives in Milwaukee, where he teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin.
Tori Malcangio writes advertising copy and fiction at a small desk overlooking a weedy San Diego canyon. Her stories have appeared in Mississippi Review,Tampa Review, Cream City Review, ZYZZYVA, River Styx, American Literary Review, Chattahoochee Review, Ruminate Magazine, Passages North, among others.
Katherine Easer is the author of Vicious Little Darlings (2011). Born in Kansas City, Kansas, she is a graduate of Smith College and lives in Los Angeles.
Courtney Knowlton works as a teacher and administrator. She lives in New York City with her husband and two young sons.
Cady Vishniac studies Jewish culture and languages at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her stories have won contests at Greensboro Review, Ninth Letter, New Letters, and Mid-American Review.
Dan Murphy is the literary half and co-creator of the collaborative storytelling website letsworm. He lives in Brooklyn.
Jennifer Wortman's fiction appears in The Normal School, North American Review, Confrontation, Massachusetts Review, Columbia Journal, PANK, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. She is an associate fiction editor for Colorado Review and an instructor at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver.
Nikole Beckwith is a writer, filmmaker, and artist from Massachusetts living in Brooklyn. Her film Stockholm, Pennsylvania premiered at Sundance 2015, and her plays have been produced by the National Theatre of London and the Public Theater. Her drawings have been featured on Huffington Post, the Hairpin, WNYC, and NPR. This is her first short story publication.
Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican writer who grew up in South Africa, South Korea, and India, and now lives in Harlem. She is the author of the novel Faces in the Crowd, and the essay collection Sidewalks. She has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Granta, and McSweeney's. Her third hard-to-categorize book, The Story of My Teeth, has been described as a collective novel-essay.
Eric Boehling Lewis is a graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program. His stories have appeared in the Oxford American and Buffalo Almanack. He teaches English and coaches wrestling at a high school in Brooklyn. He is hard at work on a novel.
Oguz Dinc has three short story collections in Turkish. His two years in the U.S. inspired stories blending his identity and his fresh eye on America. His first piece in English, "The Hurricane," is one of these stories.
