Literary short stories by established and emerging writers.Excerpts:
Geoff Wyss
Saints and Martyrs
Don was still using Speed Stick then, the cinnamon kind, and his morning smell always made me think of medieval times, cuts of meat preserved with holiday spices.
Jenny Zhang
We Love You Crispina
When we moved to Bushwick, we all slept on the same mattress again, because there wasn't any room for my smaller mattress, and because the hoods on our block stole it before we even had a chance to drag it up the stairs to our new apartment. They also stole my dad's car radio every few weeks, and then sold it back to him on the street corner by the Jewish deli.
Daniel Torday
Twins
"Or what if there were two events?" Jonah said. "What if there were twice as many events, instead of none?"
Evan Kuhlman
Toy Soldiers
The Sunday barbecues Rusty held during the summer were strange affairs. He'd have his army buddies and their wives and kids over for cheeseburgers and hot dogs, and we'd have to give the appearance of a perfectly normal and happy family.
Daniel Wallace
The Mailman
Type love and it's just a word; write it, and the letters resolve into feeling.
Nona Caspers
Ants
The ants arrived with the rains a week earlier, only a few, scattered on the windowsill, trekking up and down the sill, a reckless band of nomads. "Ants," Michelle said that first day, staring at the windowsill as if she'd forgotten ants existed.
Olufunke Grace Bankole
26 Bones
Old women's hands, wiry with age, become thinner still, with endless clasping and twisting. How high the elbows are raised, the quickness with which they are dropped again, reveal what can be done or perhaps that there is nothing at all to do. "We can only hope tomorrow is a better day, can we not?"
Debra Monroe
Interview by Victoria Barrett
I've closed every novel or novella with a group scene. There are practical reasons it feels so archetypal. I didn't invent it, any more than Shakespeare or George Eliot invented it. It's part of our narrative heritage, and for good reason: it works well to create closure in a story with a big cast of characters.
Ken Barris
Life Underwater
Lunch on Sunday is chicken and roast potatoes, as usual. The family bickers, as always. The southeaster howls in the afternoon, which is unexceptional. After lunch, the Baruchowitz family sits in the study drinking filter coffee, as they so often do.
Geoff Wyss's first novel, Tiny Clubs, was published in 2007. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly, Mid-American Review, New Orleans Review, Image, and New Stories from the South 2006 and 2009, among others. His first collection of stories (which will end with "Saints and Martyrs") won the Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction. He lives in New Orleans.
Jenny Zhang holds degrees from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Stanford University. She has worked as a union organizer in San Francisco, a youth organizer for 826 Valencia, and an English teacher in a Hungarian village in Romania. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in the Iowa Review, the Guardian, Octopus, Diagram, Vice, Jezebel, and The Walrus. Her first book of poetry, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, is forthcoming. She currently lives in France and teaches high-school students.
Daniel Torday's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Esquire, the Kenyon Review, HarperCollins's Fifty-Two Stories, and the New York Times, among other publications. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College. He recently completed his first novel.
A previous winner of the Short Story Award for New Writers, Evan Kuhlman is the author of the children's novel The Last Invisible Boy and the adult novel Wolf Boy. He has also published more than a dozen stories and has had a one-act play produced. He lives in Ohio.
Debra Monroe has published two story collections, The Source of Trouble and A Wild, Cold State. Her first novel was Newfangled (1998), followed by Shambles (2004). Her latest book, On the Outskirts of Normal: Forging a Family Against the Grain, is a memoir about being the white mother of a black daughter in a small, rural Texas town. Twice nominated for the National Book Award, Monroe has published poems, stories, and essays in many magazines and journals. She now lives in Austin, Texas, and teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University in San Marcos.
Nona Caspers is the author of Little Book of Days and Heavier Than Air: Stories, awarded the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. Stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies such as Iowa Review, Cimarron Review, Ontario Review, Women on Women, and the Hers series. She teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University.
Olufunke Grace Bankole is a first-generation American of Nigerian parentage, who has lived in Nigeria and various parts of the United States. Her fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, the Antioch Review, Stand Magazine, and several of her short stories have made finalist in past Glimmer Train Stories competitions. She is also a recipient of a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, in support of her novel-in-progress.
Daniel Wallace is the author of five books: Big Fish, Ray in Reverse, The Watermelon King, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician, and O Great Rosenfeld! He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his wife, Laura, and his son, Henry.
Ken Barris is a South African writer and poet. He has won various South African literary awards, most recently the Thomas Pringle Award for short fiction. He was short-listed for the 2003 Caine Prize for Writing in Africa, and for the Commonwealth Prize in 2007. He teaches at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, and lives in Cape Town.
