Anthologizing the last fifty years of American short stories, editor John Freeman developed a unique lens for how everything happening in the nation was being reflected in our fiction. After reading and selecting from almost two thousand stories, he created a representative literary collage that is unlike any other anthology of the form. He kindly […]
Fiction
Stories Refresh the American Language:
A Night Like That
by Eric Boyd
The picture was everywhere. Seemed like every time I turned my phone on it’d beep and vibrate and ring until I turned it back off. Yo did u see? Hey are you ok? Was that ur friend? To all three, yes. The cop that shared the photo was suspended with pay. He takes a photo […]
MARY
by Rachael Green
This story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The paint had chipped off of one of Mary’s eyes and the other had faded and begun to fleck off in places, mutating her maternal gaze into something more sinister, full of agony. I held eye contact with those eyes or, the one eye and the plaster […]
Nothing Bad Part 1: The Fire
by Mary Grimm
Pyrokinesis. Cigarette breaks. Nuns! Our serialization of Mary Grimm’s novelette starts now, with “The Flame.”
PARADISE
by Joshua Beggs
The sun beats down on Paradise like an angry drunk. It cracks the villas’ pastel stucco skin, makes syrupy heat waves roil above the tar roofs, and bleaches the loose gravel driveways into trails of jagged bone shards. It makes the oak trees sag, browns the evergreens’ needles, and turns the air sticky with the […]
Tia Marilena’s Rainbow Eggs
by Xenia Lane
This story was selected as a finalist for the 2021 MAYDAY Fiction Prize. There’s been a crisis of eggs. Tia Mari’s eggs, to be exact. I call them the rainbow eggs due to their astonishing, colored patterns. She’s collected them all her life. Her nickname, Marihuevo, was inspired by her obsession. Tio Javi is trying […]
2021 MAYDAY Fiction and Poetry Prize Winners
We’re excited to announce the results of the 2021 MAYDAY Poetry and Fiction Prizes! The winners each received $1,000 and broadsides of their work will be available soon. Submissions for the 2022 prizes will open in the spring. Judges to be announced. 2021 MAYDAY POETRY PRIZE Winner: “Garçon,” by A. Shaikh. Judge: Jacques Rancourt. Finalists […]
Lolly Pop
by Toby Lloyd
This story was selected as a finalist for the 2021 MAYDAY Fiction Prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. It wasn’t just me, no one liked Polly. Not saying she wasn’t our friend. I’m saying we didn’t like her. She joined in Year 9, and there was something funny about her coming in the middle […]
Our Small Faces by Jamie Moore Reviewed
by Raki Kopernik
I love novellas. Small books that don’t weigh down a bag or cramp your arm when held upside down, a book that won’t give you a bloody nose if it falls on your face when you’re reading in bed, and a beautiful cover that you can look at and breathe in when you need a […]
The Book of Rusty
by Benjamin Drevlow
This story was selected as a finalist for the 2021 MAYDAY Fiction Prize and nominated for The Best of the Net. If anybody was ever gonna write the Book of Rusty which nobody was, nobody including not Rusty, but if they were they’d have to trace its origins all the way back to seventh grade. […]
