_____ Mark Blickley grew up within walking distance of New York’s Bronx Zoo. He is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center. His latest book is the flash fiction collection, Hunger...
Entertainment
Hi, This Is Your Neighbor
Attention Volunteers: Due to ____________, we have updated the Get Out the Vote script as follows. Further changes will be uploaded to this site weekly daily hourly on the minute. Please note, we have...
2018: A Counter-Factual
Hillary Clinton limps into her second year in office badly battered and in poor humor. She has lately refused to hold press conferences, or even speak off-the-record as she had done regularly in the early days of...
You Don’t Know Until You Test It
If a Cheerio rolls under the refrigerator, I think I’d stick my hand under to get it out. It’s scary what’s under a fridge, believe me. And I’m human. But I wouldn’t hesitate. I see it all the time from my sky...
Food & Drinks
Three Poems by Stephanie Burt
MY 1993 I lived in a closet. Also I lived in a closet Belonging to my then-best friend’s then-beau Who lived with three other men in a Central Square Walk-up, spacious and sunlit, except For the closet. The closet...
Letter Written on the Anniversary of Roe v. Wade (on the Cusp of Its Reversal), January 23, 2022, to the Young Woman in Ruth Orkin’s An American Girl in Italy
Dear Jinx Allen, I love the pseudonym you chose and wore like a rosary around your neck for protection. But those men on the sidewalk standing around the sewer medallions weren’t under your spell. They fanned out like a...
Days until
I wake up. Russia will invade soon. I eat my breakfast. Russia will invade soon. I go shopping. Russia will invade soon. I buy buckwheat and chocolate. Russia will invade soon. I take a bus to work. Russia will invade...
Lifestyle
An Interview with Donald Quist
A resident assistant tries to break up a brawl between college athletes, but, as a young Black man, he doesn’t want to call the police for help. An eighth grader who is labelled “dangerous” sits in detention, trying to...
Bounded Functions
(an excerpt from To Those Bounded) I’m sitting at a desk, alone in a classroom smaller than any other classroom in my middle school. Every half an hour a teacher or the school resource officer enters to make sure I’m...
The Pittsburgh Massacre and its Aftermath: A Witness to the Witnesses
Whenever I’m struggling to enter deeply into the mind of a fictional character, I’ll ask myself: What is it that this character doesn’t want to know about him or herself? What feeling is she keeping at a distance or...
Latest articles
Radiant – An Interview with Nawaaz Ahmed
Nawaaz Ahmed’s Radiant Fugitives, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, is the story of a family and a country grappling with changing identity. The novel...
Water Talks
VIRUS AND STREAM It was August. The stream ran low but was busy with creatures seeking to cool off. One day a little human stood on the bank, and sneezed, and a virus entered the stream. Stream said, Are you singing...
A BRIEF HISTORY OF KYIV
Yaruslav the Wise holds the city in his hands. Its domes and alleys constructed themselves in a dream of how best to manage the hill above the Dnipro. He has a Tatar face, fur-trimmed hat, robes of an idealized medieval...
In Fragments
I. Freshman year of college, your professor in ‘Reclaiming Human Rights for Communities of Color’ tells you she teaches her daughter consent through the most basic forms of contact. If someone asks for a hug, she makes...
An Interview with Lan Samantha Chang
Lan Samantha Chang’s The Family Chao, released this February by W.W. Norton, on the surface, is a story about a Chinese immigrant family and the death of its patriarch. It is also a portrait of America, its many...
