Writers aren’t born, they’re made—from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine. And sometimes tutelage.

Carrying Fire and Water by Deirdre Shanahan “Stories beautifully told in image-rich, powerfully descriptive language and an elegiac tone.” Brian Maye, The Irish Times Paperback: £9.99 Carrying Fire an...

Some words of appreciation for a distinctive writer of short fiction

Need fiction be ‘relatable’ in order to move us? Dissecting the poetic and art-referential aesthetics of Alan Fyfe’s T and The Cross Thieves, Daniel Davis Wood foregrounds other, perhaps counterintuit...

Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

I am a dog. I am rabid. I bark, I howl, I bare my fangs. Spit drips from my mouth. I feel my anger boiling in black froth toward every living thing. As I run, I smell the fear and dread of people. One...

The musket ball. The museumgoer stares at it, a dull but once deadly sphere sitting stately and harmless in a glass case. A Rust Belt museum housed in a former Gilded Age tycoon’s manor. The exhibit i...

After we sent the billionaires to Mars we sent the managers up into the mountains to plant trees and out onto the prairies to sow wildflowers, and although later the new forests grew up in unexpectedl...

First thing: you. That old void in your head. It’s winter. The sun is an itch in your eye. There’s construction, of course; the sound wakes you as the streaky slam of your loosely hinged door concurs ...

REACTION # 1: THE SONG, SHITTY REFUGE, BY ABSOLUTE FUCKING COWARDSNervous exultation. A conviction bordering on mania that says this is reality and always has been, even if you couldn’t see it. A desi...

1. Wear clothes. a. Also: i. Bullet-proof glasses. ii. A PM2.5 filtration mask. iii. Shoes suitable for riding your e-board and, if required, running. 2. When you reach the coordinates, tuck your e-b...

Richard Varma, the illustrator, draftsman, and muralist, died of natural causes earlier this year in Wichita, Kansas. Varma is perhaps most notable for his collaborations with Sirin Volokhonsky, bette...

He did a silly dance in a bar, a dance so silly that it had no regard for choreography, ego, or social order. At the afterparty he talked about civil religion, his gentle head at rest on the cushion o...

In Homolovi, surrounded by storm clouds, faced with a hissing bull snake, I decided—like a fool—to pray to my father for guidance. The last time I’d prayed, my mother had lost her left foot to an alli...

Suppose that there were certain human abilities—I decline to call them merely mental, lest all the problematic assumptions of the Cartesian philosophy be imported at once—by which the gathering of tho...

a plant enters the supermarket without a receipt. the clerk doesn’t stop it. the plant looks at him. he feels seen for the first time by something that is not a customer. in the frozen food aisle, the...

I: INTRODUCTION BackgroundFollowing the shitshow that was this year’s holiday season, I [Primary Moral Actor] have made the decision to drive my rented Renault Clio down to mother’s to tell her precis...

I. In which Dr. Hawthorne comes to town ~ The snakeskin wagon that caused such bluster in the broadsheets from Oregon to Illinois kicked dust over the saloon steps. The menfolk—wranglers, drunks, mali...