Scott Laughlin Ivan Turgenev was out for a stroll in Saint Petersburg in 1862 when he saw fires raging in the distance, the result of students calling for educational reform. A few moments later, he was accosted by an…
Justin Mundhenk George Singleton’s Between Wrecks, released earlier this year by Dzanc Books, is a hilarious meditation on idling lives that are held together by reoccurring characters, the South, broken marriages, and plenty of booze. In “No Shade Ever,”…
Elizabeth Riggio When I walk to work, there is the sidewalk–curvy bricks of green and grey colored clay. There is the river that curves below me. There are the students–walking to school, sleepy-eyed or chatting with friends. There are the…
Claire Szabo My host madre asks if I’ve found a boyfriend yet. I smile and tell her no, not yet, although truthfully I never will. An important part of my life I can’t tell my madre. The crosses and framed…
Robert Olmstead In 2010 I read S. C. Gwynne’s EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History and thought it to be a magnificent book. …
Ellie Rodgers Novelists often cultivate stories from their own experience and pain. When Irish novelist Colm Tóibín began his beautiful new novel Nora Webster, he wrote from the perspective of his boyhood grief over losing his father, a teacher.…
Shea Faulkner By nature, I do not like fairy tales. I don’t care to waste my time on the morals and easy endings that come from far-fetched tales begging me to learn the lessons they so desperately need to…
Gabrielle Freeman I push and twist the needle tip onto the pen designed for children; the sharp punctures the rubber membrane of the small glass vial. I pierce my daughter’s thigh, fatty enough for insulin. Aurora was three.…
Robert Olmstead Think about the possibility the Battle of the Alamo was not fought for the sake of liberty and freedom, but rather, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and William Travis died on behalf of slave lords and white supremacists…
Chris Marshall When fired, mortar shells make two sounds—release and impact. Imagine a soldier under barrage, how interminable these gaps must feel. For some, the silence is infinite. Others survive, haunted knowing how easily it could have been them.…