We believe students and readers everywhere deserve a great and free modern library, inside of which they can get deliriously, entertainingly, profoundly lost. And found.

Authors

Poem of the Week
It’s wrong to say the lightning is pink is nothing other than to say it’s not.
Poem of the Week
Like a bird with a broken wing I will smudge the line of the hopscotch.
Poetry
Through the dark, we say, through the dark: but do we ever really know?
Poem of the Week
You smile into the phone static, the breath of your beloved.
Poem of the Week
We caress the rough. Sensuous, delectable, and yet sorrowful.
N30B Winners
The men here don’t know where to place me, call me exotic grail.
Story of the Week
There was a shout, then a shot fired. I pressed the shutter again and again.
Narrative High School Writing Contest
I walk over to her for what seems to be an eternity. “May I have this dance?”
Poetry
The underworld reached out for your hand and found payment.
Story of the Week
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
Poetry
I am veins and breath, the entrance the world passes through.
Poem of the Week
I thought my body was mine until it became a map anyone could use.
Poetry
The city is lit with all its lights. I’m up in the air. It is yes until I die.
Story of the Week
I managed to talk sensible Alice into a little pink outfit and high heels.
Features
Reviewers are curs and their opinions are not to be taken seriously.
Poem of the Week
I walk across the fields with only a few young cows for company.
Poetry
It ends with a flourish like smashing a glass in the fireplace.
Poem of the Week
Two animals, doe-eyed, slick across the road into the femur of the night.
Poetry Contest Winners
He was a child. He was dead. He was the shaft of a Long-tailed Astrapia.
Poetry
The stones here carry the island’s low cry inside them. A landlocked grief.
Poem of the Week
When he was a child, my father had a cousin who was buried by a plow.
Poem of the Week
I want something warm that won’t feel shame lying over me.
Story of the Week
It has come to this—my daughter is now assaulting other children.
Story of the Week
I looked into their eyes and loved them, and wished to God I was dead.
Poetry
You and the cat wish I were baking pumpkin pie and we were happier.
Poem of the Week
Underestimate the beauty in the world and spill coffee down your shirt.
Nonfiction
I’ve never heard of Badgley Mischka (A person? Two people? Man?)
Features
“Watch your purse, dear,” Aunt Florie whispers.
Nonfiction
My first true love was Underwood, my mother’s typewriter.
Nonfiction
There isn’t a nice Jewish boy in sight—not that I’m looking for one.
Narrative Taste
Why kill something so mild-mannered, entertaining, and sociable?
Nonfiction
I’m a theatrical lyricist. I would never choose to look fat in public.
Narrative 10
Try never to repeat rhymes, not once in an entire show. It tires the ear.
Nonfiction
We’re all trying, in our own ways, to parse what we may have done wrong.
Nonfiction
I don’t need to consult a healer to feel the aura glowing around us.
Poetry
Still it’s true I began as they did the ones she kept: newt-like moonish
Poem of the Week
and still it is summer and each day the sun arouses the kudzu
Poem of the Week
Every step I’ve taken has been from one tongue to another.
Narrative High School Writing Contest
My grandfather has a space where the tip of his thumb should be.
Classics
I can’t struggle against joy and suffering inseparable.
Poem of the Week
Like lions in cages, women like me dream . . . of freedom . . .
Poem of the Week
She bequeathed her children a mother who dreams and smiles.
Story of the Week
You knelt down to kiss her, avoiding, of course, the wound at her brow.
Poetry
I keep dripping milk until I’m sitting in a pool of it, sticky, white. I can’t move.
Poem of the Week
They’re are all begging to be fed. Changed. Read to. Desperate for milk.
Poem of the Week
With these fingers, afraid and aware, I stroke your delicate skin.
Poetry
After almonds after anchovies. After baguettes, a plate of cheese.
Poem of the Week
Lure, yes, you would know how to catch and clean such a thing.
Six-Word Stories
The Human Comedy: Four new six-word stories by Sherman Alexie.
iStories
Marie was Indian, and everything Indian required patience.
Poetry
Is anybody out there? Nobody answered, and I felt archaic as prayer.
iPoems
May your wife remove her shirt and have an affair with a tornado.
Six-Word Stories
Sherman Alexie
Six-Word Stories
These six-worders work in a strict three-act structure, like screenplays.
Fiction
I needed a paycheck a lot more than I needed to be kissed.
Narrative 10
In narrative terms, sex is the propeller that moves the story along.
Poem of the Week
Today brings a blue hour, but the jasmine has been dead for weeks.
Poem of the Week
We did not know at the moment of parting that it was a parting.
Poem of the Week
Neither fame nor wealth could provide consolation for life’s brevity.
Narrative Outloud
I ask that now I be allowed to see the one my vision has been denied.
Poem of the Week
I answered, blood rushing like the shadow cast by a cloud of starlings.
Poem of the Week
Mom could have been an acre away, or doe-still behind the next stalk.
Poetry
Less magic, less defense, more speed, more stealth.
Poem of the Week
Claim to be Choctaw or Cherokee. Claim to be a princess too.
Poem of the Week
There is something on my mind rushing up as river in a locked car.
Poetry
Don’t send me home without a round of applause if not a title.
Story of the Week
Ella knew she hadn’t hurt Sebastian, but she knew she’d betrayed him.
Poetry
Our cocoa is gone and our dreams are being eaten by mice.
Poem of the Week
I’ll see you on the sea, they say, but then they float past on a raft
Story of the Week
She wags her index finger so furiously that I’m certain it will snap off.
Poetry
She gives her daughter her birth certificate and oil money: Go.
iPoems
The girls got drunk, danced to Russian karaoke under disco-light glitz.
Fiction
I grabbed him by the face and told him life only comes to a person once.
Fiction
The room barely fit a bed, a chest of drawers, and a rocker, all not hers.
Narrative High School Writing Contest
Soon I will walk up those same back steps the police took by force.
Story of the Week
The Morgan nosed her for another carrot. She petted his neck. She had loved to canter.
Narrative High School Writing Contest
Nonfiction
We never really had what might be considered a normal conversation.
Classics
He got his wife off a German farmer, for whom he went to work one day.
Story of the Week
The story of Wing Biddlebaum’s hands is worth a book in itself.
Story of the Week
Americans have always a kind of tenderness for cheat.
Classics
There’s something I saw at the race meeting I can’t figure out.
Story of the Week
Sometimes I wonder if he—my father—looks back on that moment.
Poetry
In the backyard I submerge myself in a bathtub of soil, soak with the hose.
Poem of the Week
Her husband is away at the family cabin, and she is glad for the space.
Narrative High School Writing Contest
Time stops as the ball rolls tantalizingly around the rim.
Story of the Week
It was enough to make the most hardened veteran drop his guard.
Story of the Week
Instead, she stares right at us, her shoulder half-naked in broad daylight.
Story of the Week
“Then I can promise to kill either of you if I ever see you again.”
Poem of the Week
He phones from across the country after lying in the grass with another.
Story of the Week
If you can be seen, you can be killed. No-man’s-land is everyman’s land.
Fiction
Ralph’s children had believed Christine was just after his money.
Poetry
My shadow feels my company, my stepping as he steps.
Poem of the Week
I eat what’s in front of me, as all great men do. Some wouldn’t, but I do.
Poem of the Week
I know what my promises are worth, know the worth of material things.
Narrative Outloud
I eat what’s in front of me, as all great men do. Some wouldn’t, but I do.
Poem of the Week
We see how tired you are as you lean on your rifle or your shovel.
Poem of the Week
Ajax can answer all this killing only with the killing of himself.
Poem of the Week
Burly Viking raiders are standing in the coffee line, sharing pickles.
Poetry
A landscape values people at the level that it values other things.
Cartoons
When I grow up I want to be one of the horses of the Apocalypse.
Cartoons
This book club has rules, Carolyn. Everyone HAS to read the book!
Cartoons
The financial plan works if we eat 40% of the kids before college.
Cartoons
And up ahead you'll see some jagged rocks that will kill us.
Cartoons
Don’t worry. I’ve performed this procedure hundreds of times.
Cartoons
“Stop looking at women’s magazines and call me in the morning.”
Cartoons
He’s become insufferable since that MacArthur fellowship.
Cartoons
“I wish my father was alive to see how lazy I could really be.”
Cartoons
New cartoon from Mick Stevens: “It’s hardly worth the trouble tonight.”
Cartoons
“No, actually you are very different from the women I usually date.”
Cartoons
See no evil, hear no evil, speak
no evil, eat a banana.
Cartoons
New cartoons by Le Lievre, Warp, Piccolo, Leavitt, and Sipress.
Cartoons
Great new cartoons by Feggo, Katz, LeLievre, Sipress, and Stevens.
Cartoons
Great new cartoons by Conklin, Levin, Stevens, Vey, and Warp.
Cartoons
New cartoons from P. C. Vey, Shannon Wheeler, Pete Mueller, and more!
Cartoons
New cartoons from Arnold Levin, Mira Scharf, David Sipress, and more!
Cartoons
New cartoons from Lydia Conklin, Rina Piccolo, Zachary Kanin, and more!
Cartoons
New cartoons from Chris Weyant, Joe Dator, P. C. Vey, and more!
Cartoons
New cartoons from Mary Lawton, Joe Dator, Rina Piccolo, and more!
Cartoons
New cartoons from Glen Le Lievre, John Leavitt, P. C. Vey, and more!
Cartoons
New cartoons from Rina Piccolo, Arnold Levin, Joe Dator, and more!
Cartoons
New cartoons from Rina Piccolo, Emily Flake, Joe Dator, and more!
Cartoons
New cartoons from P. C. Vey, Mick Stevens, Arnold Levin, and more!
Cartoons
New cartoons from P. C. Vey, Liza Donnelly, Joe Dator, and more!
Cartoons
New cartoons from Rina Piccolo, J. C. Duffy, Bob Eckstein, and more!
Cartoons
New cartoons from Ken Krimstein, Kim Warp, David Sipress, and more!
Cartoons
New cartoons from Kim Warp, Liza Donnelly, David Sipress, and more!
Cartoons
New cartoons from Ken Krimstein, Lydia Conklin, Farley Katz, and more!
Cartoons
New cartoons from Rina Piccolo, Arnold Levin, Farley Katz, and more!
Photography & Art
A stunning collection from fourteen emerging photographers.
Cartoons
New cartoons from P. C. Vey, Rina Piccolo, Kim Warp, and more!
Cartoons
Cartoons from Kim Warp, Glen Le Lievre, P. C. Vey and more!
Cartoons
Cartoons from Glen Le Lievre, Shannon Wheeler, P.C. Vey and more!
Cartoons
Cartoons from Kim Warp, David Sipress, Mick Stevens, and more!
Cartoons
More cartoons from P. C. Vey, Liza Donnelly, and Rina Piccolo!
Cartoons
New cartoons from Glen Le Lievre, Lydia Conklin, and P. C. Vey!
Cartoons
More cartoons from P. C. Vey, Pete Mueller, and Joe Dator!
Cartoons
New cartoons from Glen LeLievre, Liza Donnelly, and more!
Cartoons
We'd see them more, but your father and I aren't much for traveling.
Cartoons
Betty Noir turns a trip to the post office into gripping melodrama.
Story of the Week
“What’s the shittiest thing you’ve ever done to someone?” she said.
Fiction
You don’t feel anything when they cut you, not at first, just the blood.
Winter Contest Winners
Ten years ago, when I was in college, my father divorced my mother and said he wanted me to become responsible for her. That is why I fled to Italy.
Interviews
You quickly find nothing interests people so much as themselves.
Interviews - Audio/Video
If you’re not having fun, then there isn’t a big impetus to stay alive.
Classics
The Interests of a writer and the interests of his readers are never...
Classics
Literary gatherings are a nightmare because writers have no shop talk.
Poetry
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.
Story of the Week
It was the stove I ran to check when the smoke alarm went off.
Narrative Outloud
Carol Edgarian
Features
My advice can be succinctly expressed in three words: Persist, persist, persist!
Features
Getting answers is easy. The difficult thing is knowing the right questions.
Story of the Week
If the kind hearts had fat purses, how much better everything would go!
Story of the Week
“I love you” is always a quotation. You did not say it first.
Story of the Week
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
Story of the Week
I am always hungry & wanting to have sex. This is a fact.
Features
If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.
Story of the Week
The rich man adorns himself and the elegant man gets dressed.
Story of the Week
Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house.
Story of the Week
It was more fun to get drunk with a friend than with a lover.
Story of the Week
Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.
Story of the Week
“I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
Narrative Outloud
Story of the Week
“I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.”
Story of the Week
The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.
Narrative Outloud
Poem of the Week
We’ve seen the news. We know the story. How even our bodies hurt us.
Fiction
Oh shit! I had that a while ago. Didn’t think I still did. So, so sorry.
Readers' Narratives
Navigating the trailer park at night felt like a raid on a strange village.
Story of the Week
I began to look for evidence of my father’s duplicity in his body.
Spring Contest Winners
Husk was sturdy. He just breathed like it. Not like me. My lungs rattle.
Poetry
Some days it seems like enough to look in the glass for glazed relief.
Poem of the Week
Like every thing made, the photograph intimates a view.