STORY OF THE WEEK

The Church of Abundant Life

By Yoon Choi
“Everyone lives like this. Other people’s wives? They run registers. They sell things. This is life. This very thing is what life is.”

POEM OF THE WEEK

Cul-de-Sac

By Dujie Tahat
Staring down the barrel of a black gun—the policeman’s silhouette on the other side—I forget I’m no longer just a boy.

FINAL WEEKS TO ENTER

Deadline: Sun., Mar. 31, at midnight, PDT.

We’re looking for short stories, essays, memoirs, photo essays, graphic stories, and excerpts from long fiction and nonfiction. Please see the Guidelines.

FICTION

Nemecia

By Kirstin Valdez Quade
I was afraid of Nemecia because I knew her greatest secret: when she was five, she put her mother in a coma and killed our grandfather.

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.

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.

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.