In Rogelio Teixeira’s letters to his ex-wife, Sera, there are a few cryptic allusions to a woman named Anna. I am writing Teixeira’s biography. It’s not a real biography, it’s one of those short introductions to an artist’s work. I’m deeply interested in his allusions to Anna. There once was […]
Moving On | Matthew Crowe
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 […]