Essay in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2018;
(cited in BAE 2015, 2016, 2020); PUSHCART poetry finalist
By S.K. Brownell
Technically, she says, our heads are always moving faster than our feet. Technically. Unless you’re walking on your hands, says Julia, and she flips herself upwards into a handstand to demonstrate. She’s never been stable enough to actually walk, actually pick up one hand and put it down in a new place, even for one… Read more »
By Diane C. Kessler
I didn’t like my sister very much, but I didn’t mean to kill her. It happened this way. The garage of my Back Bay townhouse was too narrow for a passenger to get into my old Mercedes, so I told Nancy to stand in the driveway by the viburnum. She was at an angle I… Read more »
By Kevin St. Jarre
We sat at a long table and didn’t take much notice of them, nor of any of the other people in the well-lit bar. We were just back to Prague after a weekend camping trip in the Brdy mountains, the four of us, and we decided to go out for a drink. I was the… Read more »
By Kari Middleton
When my brother-in-law came back from Tanzania, Jack and I picked him up at the airport. He was wearing jeans and a faded green t-shirt, and he looked this way and that along the terminal. I had told Jack I thought we should meet him at baggage claim, but Jack said that Paul preferred this,… Read more »
By Jesus Francisco Sierra
Everyone calls him Manteca, which means lard in Spanish. The moniker implies fat and he may be slightly overweight, even a little thick around the waist, but it’s the slippery quality of lard that earns him the nickname. It doesn’t help that his lips retract when he smiles, with the top lip often disappearing behind… Read more »
By Tej Rae
Blame the touba coffee, poured after a platter of djebou djem they stopped for on the way, in melting plastic cups. With cardamom and black pepper, slipped out of the adult world into tiny cups by waiters who assume every tenth grader finishes lunch this way. They are big people: fifteen-year-olds. Tall. With shadows of… Read more »
By Anjali Mitter Duva
An introductory note: It is 1856 in Lucknow, India. Malika is a dancer in one of the city’s most famed kothas, or courtesan houses. On this day, exactly one year after the death of her young daughter, she receives an unexpected visit from her patron, a French engineer named François, and their adolescent son, Etienne. In
By April Bo Wang
At night she could trace the pitter-patter of their feet in the ceiling. They were most active between eleven o’clock and two in the morning. Nikka stopped going to bed. She put on her robe and meandered about the dark house, following the sound of their footsteps. She didn’t sleep well these days anyway, between… Read more »
By Michael Holtzman
The little girl presses her face through the blown flap of mesh in the porch door and looks out past the tawny clumps of dead grass that lay scattered across the spare dirt plot, down to the wood where the first gusts reach in to rock the loblollies along the riverbank. Storm’s coming baby… Read more »
By Ellen Meeropol
My sister Ruth showed up on day four of the blackout, the day we began to suspect this wasn’t an ordinary grid failure. There had been no blizzard, no major wind event. It wasn’t even that cold, though the early November air already held the crisp-edged fragility of the coming western Massachusetts winter. The utility… Read more »
By Alan Davis
Chuck Larson, all-state in three sports but particularly potent on the football field, was the most popular boy in high school despite his guess in history that the Rosetta Stone was a ski mountain in Colorado. He was so popular girls actually fainted—this is no joke—at the sight of him each day as he strutted… Read more »
By J.D. Scrimgeour
Who designed these benches? Wooden slats that imprint your back, the rest of you slipping through. It’s like they wanted to remind you that you’re uncomfortable, that there’s as much emptiness as wood, that if one slat breaks everything becomes more dangerous. And this is a bench, something that’s supposed to be a place to… Read more »
By Estela González
This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.
By Estela González
This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.
By Joanna Kim
Our lunch break is only half an hour long, but today, Hayeon wants to buy a pet fish, so we close the store early and head to downtown Seoul on a bus. She stares out the window the entire ride, so I don’t tell her that I think fish are dumb and they’ll likely die… Read more »
By Sally Lipton Derringer
On October 13, 2016, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded, amid great controversy, to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” 1 the night before Dylan gets the Nobel Prize, Hayden’s fortune cookie forecasts a change of mind. the morning brings his nightly slew of… Read more »
By Michael Holtzman
The boy runs along the pitted dirt road behind the leaping tire. The tire is almost as tall as the boy and when it lands it wobbles because the steel belt stabs through the sidewall into a cankerous bubble. The boy releases the tire with one last push and he leans his hands on his… Read more »
By Lindsay Oldham
I lived with my dad until he died in his bed, and now that it’s happened, I’m not praying about it. He had a face like a chalk you drew hopscotch games in playgrounds with, those last few weeks when he was too weak for anything except believing, and when he coughed, only a sound… Read more »
By Tristan Marajh
The fossils caused a variety of speculation: was it a parent with a child, was it a pair of star-crossed lovers, was it two siblings or cousins, even? The speculation, as expected, were from lay-people, people who did not know about anthropology yet had no difficulty anthropomorphizing. Which was not to say that the bones… Read more »
By Ginger McKnight-Chavers
“The gate’s open?” Joy gasped. She slammed her sneakered foot hard against the brake pedal of the old Rover. Her torso lurched forward against the tight strictures of the seatbelt. “Jesus, mom! What the hell’s wrong with you?” “What the hell’s wrong with your mouth, Brooke?” Joy snapped at her teenage daughter without turning her
By Michael Pritchett
The best thing that could ever possibly happen happened that summer. He was forced to go live with people he didn’t know, people with reasons to try and undo him. Also, these people scared him because they lived in utter squalor. At first, he had no earthly idea why it happened. Though maybe that isn’t… Read more »
By Jasmin Darznik
This is an excerpt from The Bohemians of Telegraph Hill, a novel based on the life of the photographer Dorothea Lange and her Chinese assistant, Caroline Lee. Until she was five years old, she had neither a mother nor a name. It was 1906. Early spring, chilly and damp. All year the Chinatown papers
By Ilan Mochari
Donald heard a mermaid sing, Susy spied an elf, But all the magic I have known I’ve had to make myself. – Shel Silverstein, “Magic” The forty-two-year-old waiter reached for the lone utensil with his flabby right arm. His elbow was one inch from the left breast of a coed who reminded him of… Read more »
By Lynne Griffin
Her grandmother stands expectantly outside the apartment complex, positioned under an awning-covered walkway awaiting her ride. Every time Joyce phones Nana to make arrangements for their once-a-month Friday night bridge game, she urges her to please wait inside. There’s no way to predict how long it will take her to get from the city to… Read more »
By Anie Onaiza
The first time Kashi ran away, we thanked the saints and said, good riddance. Quietly of course. Then, like good neighbors, we went to the Burneys to commiserate. The women sat down with Mrs. Burney on her bed, below the long-stemmed ceiling fan, and were shaking their heads and touching their ear lobes. Allah, Allah,… Read more »
By Wandeka Gayle
Part 1: Whose Little Girl Am I? The night I turned sixteen – in 1979 – I dreamt I swallowed all of my teeth, and Aunt Winnie said it meant disgrace was coming to the family. I forced a laugh but exchanged a concerned look with my cousin, Bernice, as a feeling like ice spread
By Franny Zhang
A woman came up to me on the sidewalk and told me she knew what my secret was. Which one? I asked. The woman said her name was Harriet. She’d lived on my street when I was a child, but she didn’t expect me to remember her. I didn’t contradict this claim, choosing instead to… Read more »
By Adeola Adeniyi
You walk to Ricky’s on Rockaway and Lavonia Avenue and see Quincy Baker through the window sitting at the bar drinking a Coke. You wish you had worn your leather jacket ’cause the switchblade in your pocket would fit better in its secret inside pocket. You’re carrying a serious bankroll and know folks here will… Read more »
By Brett Riley
As the sand blew over the mountains, my sixteen-year-old son and I drove west on Tropicana Avenue. I wore a Who t-shirt. Lucien sported sunglasses and headphones that blasted some godawful horrorcore act like Twiztid or Insane Clown Posse, no real melody, a singer gargling scrap iron. I turned up Led Zep, the’66 Dodge Charger’s… Read more »
By James Anderson
This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.
By Marjan Kamali
This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.
By Ben Berman
This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.
By Roland Merullo
This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.
By Thomas Benz
Whit was going back to the camp, retracing the accustomed path from years ago, straight north to recover the doll. Cleaning out the lost and found where it had fallen behind a cabinet, someone had seen it tagged with the old reservation, called to tell him the mermaid was still there. Hanging up, he’d become… Read more »
By Jendi Reiter
“I am going to this wedding,” Zebatinsky declared to Carla. His middling daughter. Middle. But the switched word lodged in his brain, as happened more and more these days, branching out tendrils of other words, a not unpleasant process until he was obliged to backtrack its meanderings to the conversation he’d left hanging. Carla in… Read more »
By Dominic Lim
tempo giusto You’re told what to do from the very beginning. You might enjoy the brief illusion that you’re free to do as you wish, that you have some sort of artistic license, but the command is there in black and white. You have to be steady, consistent. Exact. The instructions guide you through everything.… Read more »
By Estela González
Chepo Menard ate and talked at impressive speed. He finished the caviar appetizer, chased a few stray eggs on the tablecloth with a moist finger and licked them. A wine stain grew on the linen tablecloth next to his napkin. Adrián Landeros listened, his thoughts hidden beneath his smile. Behind him the breeze entered through… Read more »
By Gail Wallace Bozzano
You said you were on the beach with your wife that morning. You might have lounged in one of those wood and canvas beach chairs, or you might have been lying on your stomach on an oversized striped towel from Land’s End. It might have happened like this: You would have been engrossed in the… Read more »
By Mia Caruso
As usual, you are trying not to eat too much. You already told yourself that the bite of bagel and cream cheese your daughter left on her plate at breakfast was enough for you. You might even skip lunch, you thought while chewing it. But the truth is you’re weary of all the psychological taekwondo… Read more »
By Anjali Mitter Duva
January 15, 1856 ~ We cannot afford rumors In her mind Malika was an ibis taking flight from the windowsill, rising above the rumble and jumble of old Lucknow. Leaving behind the labyrinthine alleys and bustling Chauk Bazaar, she swooped through the still, mid-morning air along the languid Gomti, following the river’s silt-laden course east,
By AN Block
I suspected Madeleine had been lying, although I wasn’t totally sure. How could I have been, and maybe, given the circumstances, I didn’t really care to know, maybe I just wanted to keep telling myself this fairy tale about The Amazing Summer of Love, or more accurately The Perfect Six Weeks, that ground to… Read more » Receive news, reviews, interviews, and more in your inbox! Plus be the first to hear about our latest issues, contests, and events.
Taming Wild Things
The House at the End of the World
Gridlock
The Cafeteria Strut
No Crying
Reflections from a Bilingual, Bicultural, Binational Writer
Lessons for butterflies (Instrucciones para mariposas)
Betta
Medals
Paper Dolls of the East
The Pious Man
Beyond their time
Excerpt from
Oak Cliff: A Novel
The Witch
Novel Excerpt:
The Bohemians of Telegraph Hill
The Old Man of The Promised Land
Gambling with Nana
A Letter For Kashi
Novel Excerpt:
My Name Is Sweet Thing
Consolation
Debts
Salvation Is a Joke with no Punchline
Butterflies Lost in Flowers (Novel Excerpt)
The Stationery Shop (Novel Excerpt)
Breaks, Tears, Dashes, Notes, Rest (Short shorts
The Strip Clubs of the Eastern Seaboard
Retrieval
The House of Correction
Theme and Variations
Agua de beber
Tsunami
Middle-Aged Woman Rethinks her Sexual Orientation while Breakfasting at a Cafe
Between Light and Earth
(Novel Excerpt)
Kiss Me Hard
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