Narrative is a nonprofit supported by readers
who love great writing.
Read us.
Support us.
STORY OF THE WEEK
Of the Meaning of Progress
By W. E. B. Du Bois
All this life and love and strife and failure—is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some dawning day?
POEM OF THE WEEK
Campanology
By Michael Prior
I’m tired of sleep—tired of belief exceeding its cause, of love curling in the telephone, subtracting week from month and month from year.
30 BELOW 30
America’s First Female Muslim Judge Found Floating in a River
by Isabella DeSendi
It is March. New York is gray, between seasons like a heart undecided between new love and loss.
FICTION
Fu Er Dai to the Max
By Xuan Juliana Wang
Some people think being called a fu er dai, second-generation rich, is an insult. Kenny and I, we are fu er dai to the max.
FICTION
FICTION
FICTION
FICTION
The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday
By David Corbett
Men can always produce attractive arguments to justify disgraceful actions.
FICTION
Visible Empire
By Hannah Pittard
He was in love with his wife, but he was also in love with his mistress, a woman nearly two decades his junior, which he didn’t think was fair.
FICTION
The Distance Home
By Paula Saunders
Seasons come and go like magic tricks, flowers blooming then fading, snowbanks swelling then melting away.
FICTION
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
CLASSICS
FICTION
The Emperor of Shoes
By Spencer Wise
I got on the back of Ivy’s motorbike at the shoe factory like a lunatic who wants to get kidnapped, as my father would say.
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
Are We Not Men?
By T. Coraghessan Boyle
Here I was caught up in this maddening interspecies pas de deux at eight in the morning, already exhausted.
CLASSICS
The Final Gift
By Isaac Bashevis Singer
“Well, the day has come when everyone has too much of everything, even paupers. Even the thieves have become choosy.”
FEATURES
NONFICTION
FEATURES
Ten Landscapes
By Russell Chatham
The most notable of contemporary Western landscape painters, Chatham has focused on rural Northern California and the wilds of Montana. Here we present a gallery of his works.
Russell Chatham the Painter, Recently Hospitalized, Emerges from Seven-Figure Debt and Alcoholism, Ready to Paint
By Rick Bass
Always I study Russell closely, with fascination.
NONFICTION
Advice for a Young Painter
By Russell Chatham
First and foremost, determine if wanting to be a painter is just a passing romantic or otherwise fanciful notion or whether in fact it is a genuinely primal calling.
iSTORIES
ISTORIES
GRAPHIC STORIES
iSTORIES
Or Else
By Sara Brody
It was the year our parents got divorced, the year our mother became an origami fiend. When we visited her, we would sit in silence, watching her fingers fly.
ISTORIES
Date with a Sociopath
By Joanna Rubery
“I don’t want facts. I want you.” He holds her gaze. “I want to feel what makes you tick.”
GRAPHIC STORIES
Summer
By Huguette Martel
Roquefort is perched on the hills above Nice; there is an exuberance of colors and smells, the incessant drilling of the cicadas, intense, dry heat.
NONFICTION
NONFICTION
NONFICTION
NONFICTION
Out of Body
By Lynn Ahrens
Many of my friends are open to the possibilities of paranormal phenomena. I wonder if they too are hedging their bets.
NONFICTION
The Gold-Toothed Dude’s Big Score
By Bill Barich
That autumn, my first in San Francisco, I ran short of money. Anybody could see it coming except me.
NONFICTION
Bats
By Anton DiSclafani
They sleep all day. At night, they leave the attic. We never see them. They do good things for us. But we do not want them.
NONFICTION
NONFICTION
SEEKING GUIDANCE?
NONFICTION
Notes Nearing Ninety
By Donald Hall
In your eighties it gets hard to walk. Nearing ninety it’s exhausting to pull your nightshirt on.
NONFICTION
Kickflip
By Neal Thompson
I wanted to take a few weeks to immerse myself in the sport and culture that had come to dominate our family.
SEEKING GUIDANCE?
WINTER CONTEST WINNERS
First Place
Second Place
Third Place
WINTER CONTEST WINNERS
First Place
Disbelief
By Millicent Dillon
In this world of 2018 the very idea of fact has come into disrepute. Many lies are now being called facts. Will it affect my story?
Second Place
After Music
By Joel Gardner
Something white at the end of the dock caught my attention when I looked that second time, and for a moment my heart raced.
Third Place
In the Absence of Rain
By Catherine Pond
You are drunk the night he tells you he won’t marry an alcoholic; in your fog, you feel sad, but metallic.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
Homeland
By Mehul Bhagat
She cuts both ways—how she can mean both love & freedom with the same hand. I know also what it means to be born in one life and meant for another.
POETRY
Elegy for Sammy
By Ralph Bousquet
I prefer to remember something simple like finding you sitting cross-legged on my unfertilized crabgrass lawn at one o’clock in the morning.
POETRY
Teenage Riot and Other Poems
By Matthew Dickman
The only way to run through the neighborhood was to run through it together, flipping off cops and skinheads.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
Two Appeals
By Alexandria Hall
My love swims you, your shoulders like hard sails under the green curls. Doesn’t sink. Doesn’t stink at all. Small powder around the moon.
POETRY
Magi and Other Poems
By Bethany Schultz Hurst
I hoped at that moment I was a stranger to him with some good tidings from a distant place.
POETRY
TWA Flight 800
By Richard Jones
Laura and I should have died too, but a lucky rain in Chicago delayed our plane and we missed the connection at JFK.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
Roman Couplets and Other Poems
By Mia Kang
When Mars falls into the forest, the birds rise skyward, saying nothing. The woman walking in the clearing pauses.
POETRY
Bruegel-Hunters in the Snow and Other Poems
By Ted Kooser
I fell asleep wondering to whom the tree might have been writing, and why.
POETRY
Field Trip
By Corey Van Landingham
Tommy (the boys cry), is thrusting his hips at the base of a cannon, so obvious, see, it is almost painful, the extravagance of his whooping.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
Why I Don’t Want to Live Forever
By K. T. Landon
You have only to try the tasteless produce at Star Market to know shelf life is a zero-sum game.
POETRY
Sweet Girl and Other Poems
By Cate Lycurgus
tell me sweet girl, how to greet you—since my mamma doesn’t believe in you or in my ability to bear another being.
POETRY
Site Visits
By Rachel Mannheimer
She’s pursued by a knight—the man who loved her unrequitedly. He’ll slay her, then remove the heart and circumjacent parts and feed them to the dogs.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
Cavitation
By Maggie Millner
Come hear me talk! Advance in age beside me and this pine! Is yours, like mine, the edgeless kind of soft? The grafted grin, the vinegary light?
POETRY
An Elegy for Mr. Vaishno Das Bagai, an American
By Faisal Mohyuddin
One day her husband’s blood would mount the most vicious testimony against him.
POETRY
Aubade with Hold Music
By Elizabeth Morton
We stood about, like white teeth, watching the morning split hairs in the shattered glass.
POETRY
iPOEMS
Fredrick the Pigeon & Why I’m a Student of the “School of Misery”
By Ösel Jessica Plante
He squinches his head into his shoulder looking like a millennial huddled beneath the outdoor table.
POETRY
Quiver and Other Poems
By Paisley Rekdal
What do we do with memory, do we burn or do we embellish it, do we study it like the elk projected onto the archery studio screen?
iPOEMS
Erratica
By Willa Carroll
I will keep sending you a dozen dead horses until you accept my steepest pathologies.
CARTOONS
CARTOONS
CARTOONS
CARTOONS
Cartoon Art Volume 2018-07
By Various Artists
Great new art and humor from Kaamran Hafeez, Mary Lawton, Olivia de Recat, Ellis Rosen, and Trevor Spaulding.
CARTOONS
Cartoon Art Volume 2018-06
By Various Artists
New laughs from Pat Byrnes, Drew Panckeri, Mick Stevens, Julia Suits, and P. C. Vey.
CARTOONS
Cartoon Art Volume 2018-05
By Various Artists
New toons by Pat Byrnes, Mary Lawton, Drew Panckeri, Mick Stevens, and P. C. Vey.
