STORY OF THE WEEK

Let Me Stay with You

By Louise Marburg
Horrified, Ripley watched him massage Elise’s shoulders. Bob said something that made Elise laugh, then slid his hands to her lower back.

POEM OF THE WEEK

Self-Anthem

By Hannah Hirsh
I feel delicious today!

Let me say it again
Truly delicious

I can claim the whole lawn
With just one flamingo

FINAL WEEKS TO ENTER

Deadline: July 31, at midnight, PDT.

Narrative contest winners have gone on to win many other prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer, the Pushcart, and Best American prizes.

Please see the Guidelines.

AWARDS FOR OUR AUTHORS

Pushcart, O. Henry, Best American, the National Medal of the Arts, the Nobel Prize, and many other accolades have been received by Narrative authors, including ones whose first publications were here.

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.

NARRATIVE OUTLOUD

CLASSICS

MASTER CLASS

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.”

MASTER CLASS

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 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.

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?

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.

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 2018-06

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
Great new toons by Pat Byrnes, Mary Lawton, Drew Panckeri, Mick Stevens, and P. C. Vey.

CARTOONS

Cartoon Art Volume 2018-04

By Various Artists
New art and humor from Pat Byrnes, Bob Eckstein, Kaamran Hafeez, Mick Stevens, and Julia Suits.