fiction

Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

“He don’t look like he’s gonna be too talkative tonight–which is a blessin’. Otherwise you’d have to listen to him go on about how you’re goin’ to hell, like me and everybody I know.”
Samuel R. Delany

How Do I Explain?

The winner of of Boston Review’s 17th annual fiction contest, selected by
Chang-rae Lee.
Adam Sturtevant

Take the Child

“On one of those early mornings, she heard a small girl’s voice, thin, reedy, dry. She’d 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 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

BR Fiction Editor Junot Díaz is interviewed on WGBH’s One-on-One. Watch the full program.

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essays

Man of Principle

The passions of Arthur Koestler
Roger Boylan

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