Brian Morton, known best for his novels Florence Gordon, Breakable You, and Starting Out in the Evening (the latter of which was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner award), has turned his skill to a book on craft. Morton, a Guggenheim fellow and winner of the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts . . .
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Detective Varela calls it an interview room, but it looks an awful lot like the interrogation rooms in Law and Order. Over-airconditioned, scuffed floors, grubby walls, one-way mirror, rickety chair to keep you on edge. Paper coffee cups litter the tabletop. Goosebumps popping on your arms and legs, rubbing against your soft . . .
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I used to have a house full of sisters and a dress that smelled like oranges. I used to have a braid—from Caroline Harper New’s “Loom,” Volume 66, Issue 2 (Summer 2025) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.I wrote my first poem in 5th grade about a purple polka-dot . . .
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For several years in her twenties, Ruth lived with a man who did not believe in happiness. When she thought of Edwin later, she remembered him in motion: pacing the uneven floors of their studio apartment, slamming cabinet doors, frying eggs, spattering oil. Always espousing various theories of living, his red hair . . .
Read MoreJuly 26th was a day like many others in Gaza. I woke up at 8:00 a.m. to fetch four gallons of potable water from the truck that would come every day to the school where my family and I had been displaced. After completing that daily mission, I was already exhausted. I . . .
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In Issa Quincy’s debut novel, Absence, the unnamed narrator mythologizes a series of figuresthat he directly or indirectly encounters, including a disgraced teacher and the student he seduced and forever changed; a lonely bus driver in Boston; a disabled landlord who mourns the lesbian aunt his family abandoned; and other strangely compelling . . .
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The bubbles of my words amuse him.He pokes them with a forward tentacleas they rise from my mouth. Biggerbubbles for longer words. I can feeland see rather than hear his giggling.See: yes. A tittering of the body,a gelatinous shake which assures mehe still likes me.—from Benjamin S. Grossberg’s “My Octopus Lover Is Easy . . .
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You must be very tallto love the dark. You needsturdy legs and a heartthat struggles just enoughto bring your blood about themand raise it again to your head.You must feel in your chestthe finite days of its function.—from Dan Rosenberg’s “To Love the Dark,” Volume 66, Issue 2 (Summer 2025) Tell us . . .
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I could not bless. I could not bleed.My body was hers from first tolast. To not say bruise or burntand when the neighbor lay medown and unbuttoned me one by one, I did not pray. I did not ask or say.—from Jessica Cuello’s “My Mother’s Daughter,” Volume 65, Issue 3 (Fall 2024) . . .
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Are they pigeons? Fifth floor, other side ofthis giant window I know by heart theircomings/goings, their stayings-put on the still—from “The Pigeons,” Volume 66, Issue 2 (Summer 2025) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote. I wouldn’t call them poems really but as I walked home from St. Eugene’s School . . .
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