“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.
Boys Club | Jack Donnelly
When I got to a certain age, though I was unaware of its certainty, my mother, with concern, took me aside and said, You are going to have to learn what I do, and have done, to know how to appreciate women in all of their habits and performances. It was too much for her to be a wife and a mother. I was only a son.
Kenyon Archive Report | Naben Ruthnum
Two years ago, a National Review piece describing Augustus Kenyon as “a somehow universally-beloved black Kissinger” elicited zero comment from the man or his foundation and ended the career of its author, Jurgen Schilze. Schilze works in industrial sourcing now, and we wanted to clarify that he is not either of us. We’re only mentioning him here to protect him from rumour and any harassment that he hasn’t earned himself. We—and we is the only way we’ll be identifying ourselves in this post—arrived at our idea to hack the digital lockbox containing the Augustus Kenyon archive after reading Schilze’s article. Not from Jurgen’s many borderline-racist arguments and his repeated elision of facts that worked against his portrayal of Kenyon as a ruthless manipulator, but from the shadows cast by gaps in Kenyon’s biography, the empty zones that Schilze pointed out.
Moth | J. M. Wong
Her cheeks had sunken so drastically that her cheekbones were much more pronounced than usual, giving her a very sharp edge. Her lips sagged, corners of her mouth drooping. The distance between her nose and chin was reduced. A bit of dark hair sprouted underneath her nose and on her chin as if she was starting to grow a beard. Without her teeth, her face had partially collapsed.
Excerpt from Psychic Lectures | Lee Suksi
You’ve felt like this since you became conscious at four years old. Always rushing to smother your sibling with a blanket to protect them from the cold. You can be too much. You want with an adrenal magnitude. You want the squares of sky in between the skyline, you want the sweet young trees, you want the girl bent over on the side of the passing bus, orange juice, pie and big drinks of wine.
Toronto 488 | Aaron Kreuter
That night, I feverishly read through the novel, sitting at my mother’s kitchen table in the dark, my cup of coffee long cold beside me. This was it. This was what I had been trying to do for all those years. The novel’s characters grew up in Jewish Montreal in the sixties and seventies, moved to Toronto in the eighties, bringing with them their dramas, their prejudices, their recipes, their joys.
Postcard From the Edge | Sara McAulay
I closed my eyes. The narrow rocky trail. The deep, deep canyon. My stomach reeled. No guardrail, no parachute, no wings, and me with no terminal illness. Me, weaker than I’d ever suspected I could be. “How soon? I’ve got deadlines. Could we wait till Fall?”
She laughed again, then coughed, coughed again, her whole frame wracked. “For you,” when she could speak, “for you, I’ll buy a postcard.”
Tear | Jared Daniel Fagen
Jared Daniel Fagen is the author of The Animal of Existence (Black Square Editions, 2022). His prose poems, essays, and conversations have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Lana Turner, and Asymptote, among other publications. He is the editor and publisher of Black Sun Lit, a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, and an adjunct lecturer at the City College of New York. Born in Jeollanam-do, South Korea, he lives in Brooklyn and the western Catskills.
Metric Birthday | Aley Waterman
The days are long and light so late. Ceremony is the faint lull of your roommate playing “Linger on your pale blue eyes” through a thin painted wall while you boil a kettle. The inside of a blue eye is like Iceland. Iceland is like a hot bath body with a cold forehead but you haven’t been, except in the airport. The Reykjavik airport is like a coffee shop.
The Wait | Lauren Bo
I contemplate the exhaustion of grief. Perhaps I’ve never truly known it, having never known the loss of a parent, spouse, or child. Please doctor, when will this unending grieving end? You were wrong. I grieved for six months, 180 days, 4000 hours, 15 million seconds. I did my duty.
Two Poems | Andrés Cerpa
Andrés Cerpa is the author of The Vault, longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award: Poetry, and Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy from Alice James Books. He was raised in Staten Island, NY.
Cigarette | Gemini Wahhaj
She watched him from the back, the red glow of his cigarette a lone light against the black sky. Sometimes, she went out to join him, hastily dressed in a cotton kamiz and shalwar, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. He turned around and gave her a smile with his stained yellow teeth, then turned back to gaze at the street below with his large, almond-shaped eyes.
Three Poems | Emily Chan
Emily Chan lives and teaches in Iowa City, where she recently completed an MFA as the Iowa Arts (2021) and Alberta Metcalf Kelly Fellow (2022) of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. These pieces belong to a poetry collection in progress, entitled “Meta Verse.” Her work has appeared in collaboration with Hester Street and […]
Like Jousting | James Yu
I crash cars. Or rather: I crash my body into cars. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. An aspirational statement. Here’s the truth: only twice in my life have I done this.
Miracle as Archive and Event: A Review of Renee Gladman’s “Plans for Sentences”
The concept of the line that runs through a line of text is just that—a concept independent of its communications. That conceptual value is uncannily visualizable in Gladman’s drawings, which sometimes flash approximations of words or phrases. The “languageness” of the drawings is radiant but unintelligible.
The Real Thing | Chris Arp
Myrtle told Horace the plan. They would take the 7:14 train to the city, to a bar called The Pit Stop.
“It’s a gay bar,” she said. “But this one has a back room. Do you understand me?”
Still Life with Bottle | Anne Colwell
For you, James. In graduate school, we’d drink the Spanish Rioja, then you’d put a red candle in the empty bottle as we drank the next. Hunched over the kitchen table in the basement apartment, we watched the red wax slide down the green curves, pool on the cloth and […]
For Hope | Suphil Lee Park
Suphil Lee Park (수필 리 박 / 秀筆 李 朴) is the author of the poetry collection Present Tense Complex, winner of the Marystina Santiestevan Prize (Conduit Books & Ephemera 2021), and has recently won the 2021 Indiana Review Fiction Prize. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in the […]
At the Sendak Museum | Charlie Sterchi
Marianne wore a nice dress and looked very handsome in it. It was her 32nd birthday. Marianne is six feet tall. She and I had an agreement. We would see how it went at the Sendak Museum and go from there.