fiction

Wednesday Nights—memoir

“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 Where’s 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

The Buddhist

“It was he who wrote the Foreign Minister’s speeches and thereby put words into the Foreign Minister’s mouth. It was a way of lying and at first it didn’t bother him any. Then it started bugging him because he found out he was a Buddhist.”
Dorthe Nors, translated by Martin Aitken

Canceled

Winner of BR’s 16th annual short story contest
“His voice is quiet, strained. He pulls her close, feels her thin body trembling. ‘It’ll be okay. You’ll see,’ he says, and the quiet house holds as they turn in slow circles.”
Jessica Treglia

Between the Devil and the Deep Sea

“She never left my father. Instead, she banished feeling. She became a mannequin. Like a movie star. Her mind was veiled. It did not want to know her. It backed away. ‘Behind the eight ball,’ she used to say to me.”
Colin Dayan

Freedom

“Six years after being declared the ‘worst of the worst,’ the men had been found to be, well, not so bad. They were free to leave The Prison, but they had nowhere to go.... The tiny island would swallow an outsized problem and, everyone hoped, not choke on it.”
Amy Waldman

House of Men

“Like Nitasha, the palm had strange growth patterns. During the divorce, it shot up happily, but when her father returned to Jaipur, remarried, and began exporting blood diamonds, its growth was stunted. It survived two hurricanes, Ewa and Iniki. The palm would not die.”
Shivani Manghnani

Concerning the Correct Way to Make Cabbage

“Aukse stems from the word ‘gold’ in Lithuanian. When she was born, Aukse’s hair was a golden fuzz, her cry a loud song. Her mother told her friends, ‘My daughter will be an opera diva.’ Her daughter, born in America, daughter of promise.”
D.S. Sulaitis

essays

Fine By Me

Geoff Dyer’s 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 Lennon’s Castle and Pieces for the Left Hand.
G.C. Waldrep

The Collaborator

Patrick French’s extraordinary authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award
James Wallenstein

Worldmaker

Remembering Thomas Disch, an author “haunted and vivified by the apocalyptic.”
John Crowley

Poison Flow

Edward St. Aubyn takes on the English upper class.
Neel Mukherjee

Uproars

On the Booker Prize–winning The White Tiger and authenticity in the South Asian political novel
Amitava Kumar

Bad News

Leslie Epstein’s magic
John Crowley

The End of Sexual Identity

Fiction’s New Terrain
Stacy D’Erasmo

“They woke up in a rage.”

An interview with Vivian Gornick
Rebecca Tuhus–Dubrow