Author Archive
The Best Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “The Neighbors” by Jared Yates Sexton
Last night I was talking to a few friends about a strange experience I had the other week—I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and when I walked through the living room on my way back to bed, I felt a deep
The Best Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “The Other Kind of Magic” by Juliet Escoria
Have I written about longing here yet? (I’m sure I have.) Every story is supposed to be stuffed to the gills with an aching desire, something pulling a character through the narrative whether they want it to or not. In a good story, longing is a taut tether that
The Best Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Letters Between Tortoise and Hare” by Brandi Wells
I’ve been in a bit of a slump lately, chaffing against my nine to five office job, weary of the routine and cadence of every week and weekend. It’s spring in New York, which doesn’t help, since all anyone wants to do is go sit in the sun somewhere
The Best Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “The Lost Caves of St. Louis” by Anne Valente
I’m not sure about anyone else, but I can remember feeling stuck as a kid. I was an impatient child (and now I’m an impatient adult). A summer then felt like an entire year. A two-hour trip to the store with my parents seemed to occupy an entire interminable
The Best Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Our Country” by Jill Schepmann
You know you’re reading something lovely when you come across a line in a story that makes you stop reading, get out a pen, and draw a dark line across the page. (And you know it’s exceptional if you even have to get up out of your seat to
The Best Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Mort Naturelle” by Ricardo Nuila
For most of us, our bodies can be mysteries, but in Ricardo Nuila’s story “Mort Naturelle,” we find them painfully explained. Here’s what happens to a spleen when a parachute doesn’t deploy; here’s how a jaw disappears when it’s been blasted with birdshot; here’s the sinewy tendons from a
The Best Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Wake Turbulence” by Laurie Ann Cedilnik
As a recent transplant to New York from Arizona, I’ve been a little obsessed with place lately—about what the landscapes of home show us when we live inside them versus when we’re removed, what happens when we start seeing our surroundings as more than just background noise—so I was
The Best Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “My Parasite” by Gina Frangello
The thing about a well-developed setting is that in many ways it’s invisible: it’s hidden in a sentence that reveals a character’s flaw, it sits quietly beside an emotional truth, it’s the catalyst for a surprising behavior. Setting grounds us in a specific context so that we can believe