The first hour driving north they listened to a best of REM compilation CD and traded few words. The freeway became a single carriageway and the suburbs turned to new builds spread further apart and without trees. The houses were the same shape and had roofs the same colour. Soon […]
The 2023 Brooklyn Review Short Story Prize Winners: This Time It’s Personal
This year’s Brooklyn Review editorial team is thrilled to announce the winner’s the 2023 Short Story Contest: This Time It’s Personal, judged by novelist Ernesto Mestre. We were truly inspired by the amount and quality of submissions we received — big congratulations to this year’s winners! Stay tuned for the […]
A Good Impression | Daniel Barrios
One That winter, when I finished grad school and had no money at all, I took a job as a packer at a dental lab. I was young and married and had two babies to support. I was not desperate, I just needed money. I had student loans haunting me […]
Heartwood | Torsa Ghosal
Before living inside a giant sequoia tree, Bhumi used to live in a townhouse in Fremont, first with a professor of poetry, and later, with a data engineer. Although she didn’t come from money, she made decent wage working as a programmer at a social media company and could afford […]
My Generation | Eugene Stein
My husband and I met the old fashioned way, at a gay bar in West Hollywood, in the days before Grindr. Carlos is from Uruguay, and to him, a semi-employed Jewish writer from Jericho, Long Island was exotic. I liked his vaguely Italian accent when he spoke Spanish, and he […]
Interview | Marie-Helene Bertino on Humor, Grief, and the Humanity of Extraterrestrials
A girl, a fax machine, a dog, another planet. This is how Marie-Helene Bertino explains the focus of her new novel, Beautyland, which came out last week with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Like all of Bertino’s writing, Beautyland teeters on the knife’s edge of fantasy. The book follows an alien’s […]
The Pocket Book | Natalie Southworth
The year I started junior high, I played ringette on Wednesday nights. One of those nights my father told me we had a stop to make before going home. He said he was painting the guest room of Madame Lavoie, a friend of one of my father’s colleagues at the […]
“I was still just some guy at a party:” Andrew Martin on Success, First Novels, and the Role of Revisions
There’s a moment in the short story “No Cops” where the heroine of the story Leslie is hanging with her closest friend as she closes up a patron-less bookstore in Missoula, Montana. Leslie holds a “waifish” book of contemporary poetry as she spaces out and contemplates the merits of intention […]
KAYFABE | Tom Quach
He dubbed himself the “Lady-Killer,” stitched across the butt of his white tights in red cursive letters. On his crotch, a faded broken red heart split into two. That was his gimmick—the pretty boy who’d check himself out with a compact mirror as he strutted down the metal ramp. There […]
Four Photographs | Nam Hoang Tran
Nam Hoang Tran is a writer and visual artist based in Orlando, FL. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Posit, Tilted House, Word For/Word, BlazeVOX, New Delta Review, Diode, and elsewhere. More at www.namhtran.com
Blistering | Alasdair Rees
Tyson’s thigh is touching my thigh. Where our legs meet on the bench, the radiant heat from his body moves through the fabric of his pants and the fabric of my pants. It’s a strange communication, I think, taking the last gulp of my mason jar of sparkling rosé. Condensation has gathered on the bottom of the jar, and I cannot help but hold the jar in the final position of my gulp, focusing and unfocusing my eyes; seeing through the bottom of the jar, letting the dew obscure the image; watching the strange blobby shape of Evelyn’s flower, watching it dissolve into an even blobbier smear.
In Between Two Voids | Nahid Keshavarz, translated by Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi
Darya is uncomfortable. Controlling the group doesn’t seem to be easy. She keeps thinking of Reza Sa’adat, and their last phone call where he said fear of death is perpetually with us, that sometimes we acknowledge it consciously and other times, hide it until it manifests in other things. The fear of loneliness and fear of death are similar. Perhaps if we can overcome the fear of solitude, we can overcome the fear of death as well.
excerpt from Silver Repetition | Lily Wang
To remember is to deny memory — to remember is to reimagine, restructure, recombine. Only through memory’s silver window can my cousin reappear. The soft, round nose, the open shell of her ear, a droplet of sweat on her temple, the skin there a little shiny, a little pink, never anything but enchanting. My hand is small in hers; in the pale grass, she harvests a fistful of black hair from the field and wraps it around her wrist like a circle of leeches.
Business | Theadora Walsh
Theadora Walsh is a writer based in Oakland, California. Her digital poetry has been shown at The Glucksman, the Granoff Center, and Pratt University and published by Oral.Pub, Inpatient Press, and Unbag. Her essays and art criticism can be found in Art in America, Artforum, Variable West, Hyperallergic, Art Papers, BOMB Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Gulf Coast Magazine and elsewhere. Currently, in collaboration with Gabriel Garza, she runs a curatorial project called In Concert.
Ars Poetica | Mia X. Perez
Mia X. Perez is a PhD student of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in The Closed Eye Open, Inverted Syntax, Raw Art Review, AGON Journal, and more.
The Age of Worry | Yvonne Cha
My real life is a mess, that’s true. I’ve been using my mom’s bank account to pay people for stuff on Venmo without her knowing, and now she’s filed a complaint for fraud. Do I tell her it’s me, I’m sorry, I never have enough money, I am always buying something for myself and occasionally for others too. Bella Hadid gave away $25,000 worth of coats to the Bowery Mission. If I hadn’t bought a bunch of shitty Zara blazers the other week I would have saved enough to have enough to actually help someone, is that it…?
Innisfree | Masha Kisel
After that first sighting, I shadowed the woman as she tapped along her walking staff. I visited the vegan Nepali restaurant where she ate, the Shakhti gift shop where she worked. Inside the employee-owned Café Assisi, I ordered a Rooibos tea and mimicked her blissful smile into the rising steam. I lingered by the community bulletin board. Reiki sessions. Bikes for sale. Missing pets.
A Return of Sorts | Gaby Edwards
We were five middle school girls in the Catskills, celebrating the onset of summer vacation with tick checks, crumbly s’mores, and the watchful eyes of one chaperoning mother. It would be the last time I saw any of them, except for Ariel. I was moving to San Diego in two weeks, which I guessed was the only reason I had been invited along.
Sentiments and Directions from an Unappreciated Contrarian Writer’s Widow | Jean Marc Ah-Sen
A life in harmony with others is a wasted one.
A man’s character is usually the opposite of that which masquerades on his face; for this reason, moderation appears to be the greatest of hidden human faults, while at the same time the most difficult to apprehend.
Apparently, never let an opportunity go by to befoul a well-heeled fellow’s banquet table.
An Interview | Jonathan Garfinkel on Georgian Theater, the Duplicity of the Soviet Union, and his debut novel
“No one is who they say they are, not even myself,” reflects performance artist Tamar Tumanishvili halfway through Jonathan Garfinkel’s funny and wild debut novel, In a Land without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark. Tamar is about to begin a three-day bus ride from Istanbul to Tbilisi in order to investigate the mysterious past of her mentor, academic Rachel Grabinsky, whose recent death has led Tamar to reassess both Rachel’s identity and her own.