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Excerpt from Girlchild
teeth Mama always hid her mouth when she laughed. Even when she spoke too gleefully, mouth stretched too wide by those happy muscles, teeth too visible. I can still recognize someone from my...
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Excerpt from Contents May Have Shifted
132. Davis, California Back on the greenbelt, this time with Fenton the dog and Liam, big brother showing little brother the ropes. If you have spent every day of your life, as Liam has, on a ranch in...
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Excerpt of Gospel Hollow
The Night Before 1. My brother Henry gets out of prison tomorrow. He called to say that he’s supposed to be released somewhere around nine in the morning, but he couldn’t know the time for sure....
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Hausfrau, by Jill Alexander Essbaum
Anna was a good wife, mostly. It was mid-afternoon, and the train she rode first wrenched then eased around a bend in the track before it pulled into Bahnhof Dietlikon at thirty-four past the hour, as...
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Excerpt from Cliff Walk, by Bruce DeSilva
Chapter 24 “Yes,” I said, “I am a member of Joseph DeLucca’s immediate family.” “And exactly how are you related?” “He’s my brother.” “Why is it, then, that you have a different last name?” “We’re...
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Excerpt from What Happened to Sophie Wilder, by Christopher Beha
Before I came to stay at the Manse I lived in an old townhouse on the north side of Washington Square, where my cousin Max and I rented rooms from a middle-aged German man named Gerhard Gottlieb, the...
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Excerpt from Fobbit, by David Abrams
They were Fobbits because, at the core, they were nothing but marshmallow. Crack open their chests and in the space where their hearts should be beating with a warrior’s courage and selfless regard,...
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Excerpt from Dora: A Headcase, by Lidia Yuknavitch
Mother is cleaning the spoons again. From where I sit in the kitchen, I can see the reflection of her trippy-looking head: bulbous skull, stretched down mouth, eyes that scoop away at the rest of her...
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Excerpt from Airtight, by J.P. Smith
There are no potholes on Memory Lane. No ruts, no broken bottles, no dead squirrels, no speed traps, nothing but green trees and pretty flowers and a road bathed in sunlight. It’s a well-kept place,...
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Excerpt from The Plum Tree, by Ellen Marie Wiseman
“By appointing Hitler Chancellor of the Reich you have handed over our sacred German fatherland to one of the greatest demagogues of all time. I prophesy to you this evil man will plunge our Reich into...
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Excerpt of Fifteen Dogs, by André Alexis
A Wager One evening in Toronto, the gods Apollo and Hermes were at the Wheat Sheaf Tavern. Apollo had allowed his beard to grow until it reached his clavicle. Hermes, more fastidious, was clean-shaven,...
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Excerpt of Thieves Fall Out, by Gore Vidal
In 1953, when he was 28 years old and already an established author, Gore Vidal wrote a pulp crime novel — Thieves Fall Out — under the name “Cameron Kay”. The novel was lost, never reprinted, and...
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Excerpt of Lot Boy, by Greg Shemkovitz
The parts truck rattles and buzzes around us, screaming from years of abuse it has taken from drivers like Spanky. My father would shit himself if he really knew what kind of idiots worked in his parts...
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Excerpt from The Incarnations, by Susan Barker
Chapter 1 The First Letter Every night I wake from dreaming. Memory squeezing the trigger of my heart and blood surging through my veins. The dreams go into a journal. Cold sweat on my skin,...
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Excerpt of Marvel and a Wonder, by Joe Meno
The boy was still asleep at seven. The grandfather went downstairs, buttered some toast, ate, then puttered off into the field to check on the corn. It was just past his knees now, the leaves a keen,...
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Excerpt of The Revelator, by Robert Kloss
And often there were those who peddled wares not for the flesh but for the eternal soul as prescribed by the Almighty, for in the progress of this new nation all faiths seemed possible, and all...
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Excerpt of Lum, by Libby Ware
A trail of fencing rode up and down the hills, cutting through the farmland. Small hand-lettered signs surrounded by black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace advertised tomatoes, squash, honey, apple...
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Excerpt of The Children’s Home, by Charles Lambert
The children began to arrive soon after Engel came to the house. It was Engel who found the first one, an infant girl, in a basket, with a bundle of neatly folded, freshly washed clothes. The basket...
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Excerpt from Good on Paper, by Rachel Cantor
Pronto! Pronto! Hello! A man with a Hollywood pizza-guy accent introduced himself. It was Romei, or so he said in a passable imitation of Romei’s voice, known to me and everyone in America from his...
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Excerpt of A Free, Unsullied Land, by Maggie Kast
Sweaty in the hot summer of ’27. An execution is imminent, and the family has been dreading it for years. Henriette wakes to the sound of feet hurrying along the hall outside her second-floor bedroom,...
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