Fiction

THE LAST GREAT NORTH AMERICAN HOCKEY TEAM by Eric Subpar

July 2, 2025

I awake on a Saturday. It is my birthday. All my friends are here. My wife is telling me about the preseason. Kevin is still coming. Don’t blow out the candles until Kevin arrives. I won’t, dear. Her father tells me about the Los Angeles Kings. I unwrap a Los Angeles Kings jersey. I’m a fan of the L.A Kings. My son asks if we can throw the puck around a bit outside after the party. That’d be great, son. My wife’s father asks me about the roster. Think we got a shot this year? That rookie’s a phenom. Sure

A LIVING SOMETHING by David Nutt

June 30, 2025

My wife looms at the ledge of the bed. The cold meat of my brain, freezer-burned with slumber, is still in defrost mode. Meanwhile, my wife has already risen, showered, powdered, dressed, breakfasted, read the morning news, cried about the morning news, genuflected and regurgitated, and undressed again. Now she stands naked in the middle of the room, like an unflappable art-class model, waiting for her indolent husband to get up and do something meaningful, and maybe felonious, with his life. I can’t fake it anymore. I get up and go to the closet, where we keep the new suit

HITTING THE BOARDWALK AND THE BEAT: AN INTERVIEW WITH JESSAMYN VIOLET by Rebecca Gransden

June 27, 2025

These actors are cracked. Out from under techno-creep overseers rise the rejects, the dropouts, and the freaks. A counterculture funhouse, home to strung out hedonists, underground musicians, magic practitioners, and those just looking for the next party. With Venice Peach (Maudlin House, 2025), Jessamyn Violet creates an alternate reality that seems too wild a proposition and yet right around an interdimensional corner. Politics and show business intermingle in new and strange ways, as LA’s free spirits are put to the test. I spoke to Jessamyn about this unruly book. Rebecca Gransden: Step right up here, Pop Stars and Punkers…

WE FOUND AN ENORMOUS HOLE by Quinn Adikes

June 26, 2025

We happened upon the enormous hole by chance. It was a tremendous hole. The largest I have ever found. Perhaps twenty feet in diameter and located in some woods along the Southern State Parkway. The walls of the hole were perfectly flat and thus of unnatural design, although I cannot say who would have dug such a thing. I could not see to the bottom. I threw a rock in and listened to it bounce against the walls, and listened to the sound grow fainter and fainter and eventually vanish altogether. Of course I urinated in the hole. My need

ORCAS, or LIFE & ART & MAGIC & BEAUTY by Aaron Burch

June 25, 2025

My buddy Pilot comes to visit. Says it’ll do him good to get out of town for a couple days—new scenery, change of pace, leave the normal life problems and complications and stresses behind. But also we’ve been wanting and meaning to hang out for a while. The new scenery and change of pace and leaving behind of life’s problems and complications and stresses are all bonus. Icing on the cake, cherry on top. All that. It’s sunny out, blue skies, warm. It is beautiful, in that way that can feel unique and special to the Pacific Northwest. We make

NEW WAVES AND NOWHERE ROADS: AN INTERVIEW WITH BRANDON TEIGLAND by Rebecca Gransden

June 20, 2025

With the short fiction collection My Child is a Stranger (AOS, 2025) Brandon Teigland offers a close reading of possible futures. Teigland’s exploratory voracity lays the groundwork for an examination of impulse, whether towards the limits of art or the human. The realm of theory has to live in our very real, fleshy heads, at least for now, but what happens when assumptions break down? I spoke to Brandon about this questing and interrogative collection. Rebecca Gransden: How long has the compilation of My Child is a Stranger taken you? What was the process of choosing the stories for

CASSIE by Matthew Feasley

June 18, 2025

Everyone was lined up to watch. We’d waited months. Cassie sat beside me on the curb as her dad revved the engine of his bike. Ready. All eight cars from the night’s derby were bumper-to-tail in front of him like a canyon. He had cleared seven in Wichita once, but never eight. Cassie’s step-mother Luann had refused to show. Cassie and I both wore shirts with a graphic of him soaring through the air. He signed them earlier that day, laughed and apologized that he was out of the smaller sizes. “Christ sake, those look like dresses on you two…”

HIS BODY by Amy DeBellis

June 16, 2025

We’re brushing our teeth side by side at the sink, like we do every night, when I see it. A spot of bright red on my husband’s face, peeking through the bangs that have been out of fashion for years, but which he refuses to grow out because I adore them. It’s no bigger than the tip of my pinky. But it’s definitely not a pimple. It’s flat and even and there are ripples in the skin around it, like the imprint left by a tiny elephant’s foot. I get less than a second’s glimpse before my husband bends over

ANOTHER WORD FOR IT by David Hering

June 13, 2025

The woman who wrote Beowulf considered it juvenilia. She composed it during the years she roamed close to the old hall, hearing the revelry, watching the fighting and fucking from the slippery dark outside. Over the long seasons she recognised, in her observations of the hall, a will that sprung from its inhabitants; a mode of life that ran in tight, obsolete cycles. Drink spilled, offence taken, necks opened, blood added to mud, children made, killed. These dances played out, accumulated nothing. Over time, she moved away from the hall and disavowed the tales she wrote about it. In their

PERSONAL LIFE #35 by Ulyses Razo

June 12, 2025

In 1983, when I was 32, I invited my Sorbonne classmate Renée Hartevelt to dinner at my apartment at 10 Rue Erlanger, under the pretext of translating poetry for a school assignment. I planned to kill and eat her, having selected her for her health and beauty, characteristics I felt I lacked. I have had a lifelong suspicion that people find me mentally and physically repulsive. However, many of those who meet me find me to possess obvious intelligence and a sense of humor. They also find me handsome, although of austere appearance. I am often regarded as “very self-analytic.”