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.

Stories

Story of the Week
The peanut seller tore sheets out of paperback books to make the cones.
Classics
The distant past returned—what part of it, he could not decide.
Story of the Week
The prisoners were ten ragged scarecrows wearing prison suits.
Poetry
I think of the mortal patience that made the constellations long ago.
Poem of the Week
I shoved them one by one, easy as pie yet with care, just shy of mercy.
Poem of the Week
History howls for direction so I remind him how the hero was lost.
Poem of the Week
Better to rewrite Baudelaire: The body only exists in the dark.
Photography & Art
For my vacation last summer, I visited the Bateer family in Xiwuqi.
Classics
Certainly the ushers who pass the baskets know me as a miser.
Poem of the Week
It’s so delicate, the light. And there’s so little of it. The dark is huge.
Interviews
I used bravado to protect myself when we lived in poverty.
Nonfiction
We take our solace, in a time of malaise and mourning, in the close-at-hand.
Story of the Week
“We’d be naive,” Crump went on, “not to assume that people are vile.”
Story of the Week
The preacher looked me in the eye. He laid his hand on my chest.
Poem of the Week
You will be a broke blues man with only some story of how you were.
Poem of the Week
I wanted to ride this day down into night, to smooth the unreadable page.
Fiction
How different they were; how comfortable he was with them being so.
Poem of the Week
Alone but one year sober and my parole’s nearly done.
First & Second Looks
He could hardly breathe; sweat was trickling down his face.
Poetry
Ghosts are real. This much I know. It’s the living that give me trouble.
Story of the Week
The presents you receive will not have been chosen with such care.
Story of the Week
I sometimes forget I’m a horse. I’m also a man dressed as a horse.
Nonfiction
My grandfather committed my grandmother to a mental asylum.
Fiction
Frank kept his face blank as he read the orders: Report to Berlin.
Nonfiction
Neither blood nor belonging accounted for my presence in Ghana.
N30B Winners
Life, then, was song and purple font, imagining in words a future.
Story of the Week
She had been sleeping more and more as the tour went on.
Poem of the Week
Now we have the shells, the casings, emptied and scattered, strewn
Story of the Week
Lebanon’s dreams of a homeland were fading with every rocket launch.