Photo: Hamed Saber / flickr.com/hamed
The Gentleman Thief
From the winner of the Bita Prize in Persian Letters, a story of a girl faced with the violence of the state. Plus, Between Two Worlds, the authors Bita Prize acceptance speech.
fiction
Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
He dont look like hes gonna be too talkative tonightwhich is a blessin. Otherwise youd have to listen to him go on about how youre goin to hell, like me and everybody I know.
Samuel R. Delany
How Do I Explain?
The winner of of Boston Reviews 17th annual fiction contest, selected by
Chang-rae Lee.
Adam Sturtevant
Take the Child
On one of those early mornings, she heard a small girls voice, thin, reedy, dry. Shed always thought, fantasized, that mothers communicated with their children telepathically.
Jess Row
Seven Little Stories About Sex
The father forgot to explain the sex part, how the sperm and the egg got to be in the same place at the same time and so for years the boy thought the sperm flew out of the man and through the air to where it entered the woman and multiplied like cancer.
Eric Freeze
Wednesday Nightsmemoir
One constant of my childhood, as the youngest of seven, was this: I was forever laughing and crying at once.
Vestal McIntyre
Everything is Breakable with a Big Enough Stone
That month, her period was late. She missed it ferociously, even though it was such a pain and mess. She missed the way it had protected her for seven days and nights.
Taryn Bowe
One, Two, Three, and Four Rabbits
and Wheres Your Sense of Humor?
Later, it came, with its lowering throng of clouds laden with heavy and toxic gasses. Thus, though long-predicted, the annihilation came unexpectedly. Also unexpected was that some survived.
Aura Estrada
BR Fiction Editor Junot Díaz is interviewed on WGBHs One-on-One. Watch the full program.
essays
Man of Principle
The passions of Arthur Koestler
Roger Boylan
Fine By Me
Geoff Dyers unlikely terms of engagement
James Wallenstein
Desperately Seeking Sam
Remembering Beckett twenty years after his death
Roger Boylan
Life Work
Nicholson Baker grows up.
The Anthologist can be viewed as a tour de force, defined as the work of an artist seeing how much can be made out of very little, and succeeding in making a lot.
John Crowley
Last Wishes
What Nabokov left behind: The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments.
Leland de la Durantaye
Wonder Land
Americans who find castles in their backyards are a benighted bunch. A review of J. Robert Lennons Castle and Pieces for the Left Hand.
G.C. Waldrep



