My father told me shortly before he died I should run if I see a leaping toad in the middle of the city in the month of January. What is chasing it could also affect me. Well, I was in the middle of Oba Adesida Road, the busiest street in Akure, a city in Ondo […]
Fiction
An excerpt from the novel SEASON OF ASH by Jorge Volpi (translated by Alfred MacAdam)
Enough rot, howled Anatoly Diatlov. The alarm went off at 1:29 a.m. Moving at 300,000 kilometers a second, the photons passed through the screen—rendered brick-colored by the dust—pierced the air saturated with smoke from Turkish cigarettes, and, following a straight line through the control room, smashed into his pupils just before the blare of a […]
A QUICK LOVE STORY OF SLIGHT PROPORTIONS by Emilia Snyder
The Argentinean geologist’s wife was a Russian who married to stay out of Russia. They met and hit upon that plan in a bar in Buenos Aires, and in the course of the night were engaged, married and conceived the first of their three children, all in the delirium of white rum. After marrying and […]
THE WALL OF DEATH by Chris D. Harvey
A long time ago, my father started riding his motorcycle in the Wall of Death at carnivals all over England. Biking round and round in that giant barrel, up and down the steep walls, he thought would be a way to make money fast. Careening one-handed, winning even, still, enough money didn’t come. Death didn’t, […]
A CERTAIN KIND OF RURAL STORY by Scott Elliott
… goes like this: An old man and an old woman live on a remote ranch adjoining thousands of acres of public land in the American Southwest. They raised a boy and a girl in the ranch house and in the surrounding hills and mountains and still encounter younger versions of these children and of […]
THE AVIAN GOSPELS by Adam Novy
an excerpt from THE AVIAN GOSPELS by Adam Novy Short Flight / Long Drive Books 278 pp. $12.95 Morgan had begun to fear the surface. Norwegians were an inch away from rioting, many carried weapons, staves and clubs and bats they’d spiked with nails, not to mention guns, and he knew how the RedBlacks would […]
THE COMPLETE WORKS OF MARVIN K. MOONEY by Christopher Higgs
an excerpt from THE COMPLETE WORKS OF MARVIN K. MOONEY by Christopher Higgs Sator Press 352 pp. $13.99 Prolegomenon [Mooney unashamedly delivered this paper—which amounts to a glowing critical appreciation of his own creative work—at the 2001 Symposium for Postmodern Studies, to a room full of colleagues who reportedly felt a collective discomfort. Mooney, however, seemed […]
THE HOLY BOOK OF THE BEARD by Duff Brenna
an excerpt from THE HOLY BOOK OF THE BEARD by Duff Brenna New American Press 360 pp. $14.95 This is no wing for an unripe wit. If these feathers flutter too swiftly for you, put this page away, read Sports or Obits, or the gluttony of Heloise, Section E, p. 5. To such-a-one who lingers over […]
THE THAW by Ólafur Gunnarsson (translated from the Icelandic by Ólafur Gunnarsson and Steven Meyers)
The brothers were handy men who took on all kinds of odd jobs. Ragnar, the older one, was a balding, scrawny man in his fifties who suffered from rheumatism, and it showed in the way he carried himself. Jonas, the younger one, had been subjected to his brother’s tyranny ever since he could remember, and […]
IDBABY by Jessica Neiweem
Lewd In The Graveyard. An Audience Of Fantastics. Mandy’s a writer. Or Hart is. Doesn’t matter. Someone’s scribbling in a hardcover notebook with a Sharpie, and it fucking stinks. Short things. Half-thoughts. Hart and Mandy aren’t big on follow-through. They are big on slurpees from the Kum-N-Go, or the 7-11, whatever the crapass convenience store […]
