Literary short stories by established and emerging writers.Jonathan Freiberger
Pinsky Gets It Right
And this was probably the only tangible realization that had proved to be of any practical use whatsoever arising from seven years in analysis: that everything could be traced back to one critical event.
David Goguen
Old Teeth
I ask her what happened to her box of stuff, and she goes back inside to get it. I'm just trying to be a good guy. But it sounds like we're old hats at this, drinking in the middle of the day together and leaving our things in bars. A real sorry team.
Joseph Vastano
Twinning
She and I have no one else to talk to about our dead father, from whom we inherited bipolar disorder and a tendency to quit on ourselves. I was luckier than Rae, though.
Tracy Guzeman
Body of Work
On a white hot day in August the sea swallowed Trig Carlton's son and spat him out again in a briny, foaming mouthful.
Meredith Luby
Boxes
Three hours ahead of me she makes my father's breakfast. Later, as I crack my own eggs I notice that my hands are beginning to resemble hers. Italian peasant hands with dry knuckles and thick veins. I pull my sweater over my palms to walk to the bus stop.
Josh Rolnick
Interview by Eric Wasserman
At dinner with my wife that night before the show, I wrote the names of the stories on a paper napkin, four under New Jersey, four under New York, and, for the first time, I thought: this is it; I have a structure. Of course, it didn't hurt that my wife, who is my best reader and most trusted critic she sometimes seems to know me and my work better than I do thought so too.
William Gay
Interview by Sybil Baker
It seems like if you're writing for an audience and you keep them in mind, the work is going to be more bland, with the rough corners knocked off, and will be more generic. I've always tried to avoid being generic.
Abe Gaustad
Buch and the Snakestretchers
"I'll leave you … right here and you can get Greyhound to tow you home." "Then do it, Jimmy. You've been talking that … all the way. Let me out and leave me if you have to."
Jennie Lin
The Unmoored
The mounted televisions played a segment about a Californian man who had drowned while running around the Del Norte beaches, up by the Oregon border, in a hapless attempt to get some close-ups of the tsunami.
Adva Levin
Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, Please
When you can't resist the urge for the home-cooked flavors of home, find a Lebanese restaurant. Be surprised at the number of Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians that you meet. You'll need America to be able to talk to each other.
William Akin
Powerball
The radio station buzzed out an unaccented litany of headlines: more rain in the forecast; the Dow closed at 3008.72; unemployment was steady at 5.3 percent; a seven-year-old local boy was struck by lightning while walking past a tree in his front yard.
Jonathan Freiberger grew up in Tenafly, New Jersey, and graduated from Oberlin College. He worked in Hollywood for a while then, tragically, fell into finance and banking. His story, "In the Style of Decadence," appeared in Ducts, the online webzine of the New York Writer's Workshop."Pinsky Gets It Right" will be his first print publication. Everything before that got rejected.
David Goguen lives in San Francisco, where he is working on a collection of short fiction. He is the recipient of Glimmer Train's November 2011 Short Story Award for New Writers, and "Old Teeth" is his first story accepted for publication.
Joseph Vastano started writing at sixteen. He traced Jim Morrison to Kerouac and Rimbaud, took them at their word, and deranged his senses on the road for twenty years. Now he's sorting through it all. He owes a great deal of his success to his wife, Sofie an outstanding poet and to the Texas State MFA program.
Tracy Guzeman lives and works in Northern California. Her fiction has been published in Gulf Coast and Vestal Review, and she has twice been a Glimmer Train Top 25 finalist. Her short story "Just Don't Love You Anymore" was performed as part of the New Short Fiction Series Emerging Voices Group Show.
Meredith Luby is a graduate of Guilford College and is an MFA student at Brown University. She is originally from northern Virginia. "Boxes" was her first story accepted for print publication. Her work has since been published in Redivider and online in Umbrella Factory Magazine.
Josh Rolnick's story collection Pulp and Paper won won the 2011 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. His collection contains four stories set in New Jersey, where he grew up, and four in New York, where he spent his summers as a kid. He is a former reporter who now serves as a fiction editor for the journal Unstuck and publisher of Sh'ma, a journal of Jewish ideas.
William Gay's first novel, The Long Home, won the James A. Michener Memorial Prize and was honored as a New York Times Notable Book. His second novel, Provinces of Night, and a short-story collection, I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down, were published to critical acclaim. His stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, O. Henry, Best New American Voices, and Best American Mystery Stories. His third novel was Twilight (2006). The 2010 film Bloodworth starring Kris Kristofferson was based on Provinces of Night. The title story from his short-story collection was also made into a film, That Evening Sun, starring Hal Holbrook. Gay was the online music critic for Oxford American, and was profiled in a short film. He died in his hometown of Hohenwald, Tennessee in February 2012.
Abe Gaustad has studied creative writing at the University of Memphis and the University of Tennessee. His stories have appeared in Third Coast, New Orleans Review, Camera Obscura, Memphis Magazine, Gulf Stream, and elsewhere. He is hard at work on his first novel.
Jennie Lin has been previously published in the Missouri Review. She graduated from Harvard in 2003 with a degree in English, and currently lives in San Francisco. She is working on her first collection of short stories.
Adva Levin grew up in Israel and the United States. She received her MFA in creative writing and literary translation from Columbia University, and is currently working on her first novel. "Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, Please" is her first story accepted for publication.
A wayward Hoosier, William Akin abides in the Pacific Northwest, perched on the edge of an extinct cinder cone. He hasn't a strong grasp on the differences between prose and poetry, nor myth and truth, often co
