The first casting call was a genesis. I’m sure of it now. I walked into a warehouse on the southeast side of town.
Fiction
Every Kind of Woman
Fountain of the Dying
by Austin Sanchez-Moran
On a whitewashed island in Greece, where the brass church bells chime out into the sea
every evening, there is a slender old woman in a red head scarf who yells out, “Soup! A scoop of
soup!” while banging her tin drum with a ladle and wandering the cobblestoned alleyways.
Extract from X by Valentina Mira
translated from the Italian by Sean McDonagh
When it’s my turn to sleep, I dream of a wolf. It follows me around the rooms of the house. I have no idea what it wants with me, nor who is hiding beneath that fur. I wake up with my heart beating in its ribcage; it’s weird, it seems almost like it intends to take flight as if it were a hummingbird. And unfortunately, it’s a heart instead.
Shit Cassandra Saw: A Unique and Thrilling Debut
by Angelina Mazza
“Women can never be emancipated from the stupidity of men.” For MAYDAY, Angelina Mazza reviews Gwen E. Kirby’s remarkable, dark, biting feminist project, Shit Cassandra Saw.
Out of Body
by Liza Olson
I am lying flat on the ground in a quiet living room in a quiet home in the kind of quiet suburb everyone’s at least driven through, if not lived in. I am breathing deeply, from my diaphragm, like the VHS instructed.
Mr. Z by Grzegorz Wróblewski
Translated from the Polish by Peter Burzyński
Mr. Z opened the door to a preacher of the One Truth: the man in a hat looked around the room.
Sex, Youth and Power in Julia May Jonas’ Vladimir
by Megan Jones
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas is a novel with, as is increasingly prevalent in modern literary fiction, an “unlikable female narrator.” But her unlikability stems from her refusal to sugarcoat the realities of aging and its attendant loss of power.
The Closet
by Julia Halprin Jackson
There were two beds in Little’s room. Put back to back they were as long as his father was tall. The walls were covered in a light floral print.
Wichita
by Nadia Villafuerte, translated from the Spanish
by Pennell Somsen
A family is an accident. I know because I live far from mine and sometimes I catch myself repeating their patterns from miles away, at other times they’re a band of strangers, like I would encounter at a bus stop, if we rub elbows.
We Are History: Ardor and Visibility in Robin Gow’s A Million Quiet Revolutions
by Katherine Fallon
Written in verse, A Million Quiet Revolutions queers both the novel and young adult genre by using altered form and subversive subject matter to break expected literary boundaries.
