Narrative is a nonprofit supported by readers
who love great writing.
Read us.
Support us.
STORY OF THE WEEK
Singing
By Patricia Sammon
Father, when you press your ear to the screen and this man begins to tell you about the accident, tell him he is my enemy and therefore I love him.
POEM OF THE WEEK
Testament
By Matt Terhune
To be handed the story of the beautiful and brutal world rather than the tale of transcendence, mother raised by the arms of radiance to God’s mouth.
NARRATIVE IN THE SCHOOLS
30 WONDERFUL POEMS
Guests of Gravity
By Marsha Rabe
There’s a kindly, slow-motion clunkiness to our decline. We’re half an inch behind ourselves, on our own faint trail, catching up.
FICTION
FICTION
FICTION
FICTION
The Session
By T. Coraghessan Boyle
You didn’t need psychotherapy anymore. You didn’t need books and study and lab rats—all you needed was this, a little pink pill.
FICTION
Vieques
By Kevin A. González
She unfurled a Puerto Rican flag, pulled a Luger automatic from her purse, and yelled “¡Viva Puerto Rico Libre!”
FICTION
Merry Elf
By Tom Jenks
You’re not yourself, his wife Ana said. It was what she always said. She was right, in a way.
FICTION
FICTION
FICTION
FICTION
Obsession
By Josip Novakovich
Instead of trusting him more after solving the mystery of Obsession, she mistrusted him more: he was a liar. She trusted herself even less.
FICTION
Safe Harbor
By Morgan Talty
The ambulance arrives. Seven EMTs. They ask my mother questions. She cannot answer them, and in that she’s truthful.
FICTION
Out to Lunch
By Marian Thurm
At her new job on Madison Avenue at a glossy magazine, Mel will, it’s been promised, be meeting famously brilliant writers.
FICTION
NONFICTION
NONFICTION
FICTION
Dido and the Lottery
By Katherine Vaz
She’d won $250. To double-check, she carried the ticket to her lamp. She’d made a mistake. The prize was $250,000.
NONFICTION
Dante on Broadway
By Hal Crowther
Who benefits when we obscure, neglect, and trivialize the accumulated knowledge of the past and its printed artifacts?
NONFICTION
Pilots
By Bridget Quinn
Our unspoken family motto, revered as any coat of arms, was something like We Shall Take No Shit.
NARRATIVE 10
NARRATIVE BY HAND
CLASSICS
NARRATIVE 10
Ten Questions
for Nathan Englander
I remember reading 1984 on the basement floor when I was way too young and immediately understanding what a novel could do.
NARRATIVE BY HAND
Notes and Annotations
By William Butler Yeats
Handwritten drafts of “Byzantium,” “Easter 1916,” “Under Ben Bulben,” and other poems.
CLASSICS
In the Shadow of the Glen
By John Synge
Maybe cold would be no sign of death with the like of him, for he was always cold, but I’m thinking it’s dead he is surely.
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
POETRY
POETRY
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
Ca Dao
By John Balaban
In 1971–1972, on a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, I returned to Vietnam with a tape recorder to collect the oral poetry know as ca dao.
POETRY
Affliction Parish and Other Poems
By Wendy Barnes
Under the numb of sunrise, our synapses atrophied in sweet tea, we watch the floodwaters seethe then recede.
POETRY
Poems from OBIT
By Victoria Chang
There are moments that are like brushstrokes, when only much later after the ocean is finished, become the cliff’s edge that it was all along.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
Winnipesaukee and Other Poems
By Heather Christle
Some years a truck fell through the ice, and others someone would lean back too far laughing at a joke. The boat’s motor would take off their legs.
POETRY
Dear John and Other Poems
By Lisa Fay Coutley
From the other side of the wall I hear the woman who could just as easily be me in my bathroom repeating I am forty.
POETRY
First Law of Thermodynamics and Other Poems
By Courtney Flerlage
Sam from the balcony above mine, at night I can’t see the stars above me because your balcony is in the way.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
Annunciation of the Self-Enclosed God
By Gina Franco
Once summoned, what is left but to become a flash of angel, or ghost, a bar of time, motionless but about to move.
POETRY
Exhaling and Other Poems
By Bob Hicok
I was a skinhead in look and seem, a balding guy trying out the future with a shaved head while wearing blue jeans and a white T.
POETRY
The Wilderness around Us and Other Poems
By Gwendolyn Ann Hill
As we push our way south, the sea fights us, sends currents of tentacled strangers against us.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
Anemoia and Other Poems
By Keetje Kuipers
Already my daughter’s learned nostalgia by example, what to feel at a loon’s call or when passing a blue door.
POETRY
Oh You Little Faith
By Robin Myers
What if you really have, by now, acquired everything you need from the people who made you because they wanted to make you.
POETRY
Kunitzieform
By Sharon Olds
When Stanley’s thought was done, he turned his long, loping engine toward the task of telling it, word by word.
POETRY
POETRY
iPOEMS
POETRY
Orisha Poems
By Leslie Sainz
Mother, I am not married but I give, am giving, fullness. Am conjuring. Egret in flight. Scent of powder, sea foam.
POETRY
What’s Happening
By Lauren K. Watel
The night, all the darknesses, the secrets and the hiding places, these will be memories, and even they will burn.
iPOEMS
People We Will Never See Again
By Ted Kooser
He began singing, but softly, the words to a song that played above our heavy silence.
FALL CONTEST WINNERS
First Place
Second Place
Third Place
FALL CONTEST WINNERS
First Place
Things That Don’t Keep a Lightning Bug Alive
By Brenden Willey
I had some in my jar when my dad said Get what else you need for a couple days, we’re going to find your mother.
Second Place
The Winterist
By Renée Thompson
Owen O’Keefe would have stayed in bed an extra hour, but he had no time for sickness. Mrs. Raleigh had called a little after 6 a.m., saying her miniature horse was dying.
Third Place
Four Hundred Rings
By Courtney Marcelo Norton
With a swish of his quill, the judge made it a fact. Reuben woke up that morning a colored boy; when he went to bed he was, in the eyes of the law, a white child.
N30B WINNERS
First Place
Second Place
Third Place
N30B WINNERS
First Place
All the Girls Are Fat in Heaven
By Madison Dettlinger
The thing about not eating is it takes strength. Secret strength too, which is the hardest kind.
Second Place
Reading Rilke and Other Poems
By Aria Aber
The men here don’t know where to place me, call me exotic grail, call me Ariana. Any other they know.
Third Place
Asteroid B612
By Anna Besh
Once I drove your car home after an entire night spent in the dark—a group of us trudging along to the top of a mountain.
CARTOONS
CARTOONS
CARTOONS
Cartoon Art Volume 2019-03
By Various Artists
Great new toons by Pat Byrnes, Lydia Conklin, Bob Eckstein, Mick Stevens, and Julia Suits.
Cartoon Art Volume 2019-02
By Various Artists
New laughs from Seth Fleishman, Sam Marlow, Kim Warp, Sofia Warren, and P. C. Vey.
CARTOONS
Cartoon Art Volume 2019-01
By Various Artists
New art and humor from Pat Byrnes, Maddie Dai, Joe Dator, Sara Lautman, and David Rowles.
