The girls are rising. They clamber forth from deep pits in Juarez, the lunar slide of their hipbones canted and pocked. They scratch their way out of shallow holes in the Oregon forest, dirt staining the fractured moons of their fingernails. In Florida, saltwort coils round their feet, desperate to keep them there in …
I always knew that I would burn. I knew it even at eleven, standing in the Jehovah Hall wearing a Pepto-Bismol pink crinoline dress, my fat-knobby knees rubbing that rough fabric, the itch of that crinoline dress and a forced smile. The force upon me like damp fur. I could smell it, the danger of it, God, …
This week’s story is the first of our We Are Here Now Online Issue which features stories dedicated to women and other under-represented voices. A new story from the issue is to be published every Monday. Imagine if you will, the author as a teen: awkward, black, and completely absorbed in the act of …
According to fiction writer Neil Gaiman, “Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, …
American writer Madeleine L’Engle told us, “Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.” Below are a few we found this week that force us to agree: An excerpt on Lit Hub from Melissa Broder’s upcoming book on love, marriage, sex, monogamy, and illness that, seriously, you can’t miss: “But we can’t freeze the way …
Ursula K. Le Guin said: “The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.” Read this week’s links below of great stories from around the web; bring them to life. Kevin Maloney gives a hilarious recount of a mosh pit …
Scientists should be futurists. If we don’t understand flowing wells, then what chance do we have for a future? At the end of July, I stood among a cluster of Sustainable Agriculture students from Iowa State University under a gazebo in Eagle Grove, Iowa staring at an elbow-bent pipe sprouting from the cement foundation. We were …
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if …
I swung between rage and guilt. It was my work that had caused this to happen to my husband. And yet was it not Javad who had betrayed me? But I was not in his shoes, isolated, away from my wife and daughters, vulnerable. I thought of telling him that he was not alone. That …
Many years later, after he’d forgotten how to write stories, García Márquez began to call his brother. What day is it? He would ask. And his brother would tell him, in a voice that was a blend of respect and simple tones, It is Tuesday or It is Friday afternoon or It is the last …