MARNIE The first time I saw Marnie naked, she was lying on her back in an ambulance while two paramedics cut her yellow Burton shell off her torso. The zipper must’ve been caught on the fabric. The medical boys sliced her jacket and all the fleece underlayers right up the middle with a razor-sharp scissors […]
“The court will now pronounce its verdict,” the judge remarked plainly, as if he was going to read out the evening news.
Asghar Khan stood up in the witness box with the anticipation of a man in that twilight zone of hope when the decision has been made but not yet announced . . .
PART I Last May my whole family drove out to JFK Airport to meet Raymond. He had been gone for six years, and Dad was carrying his camera as if Ray were some kind of movie star. Usually, I was nervous around Ray, but I wasn’t that day. Partly because I didn’t live at home […]
En route to her job at the morgue, Jinx walked on JFK Boulevard to the PATH station at Journal Square. It was hot for June, the evening cloud cover an airless ceiling pressing on the street. A grimy storefront diorama displayed mannequins behind plate glass, girls with bald heads and painted-on lashes, clad in cheap, thin dresses. They stood frail against the hard gray light. Commuters hustled by, indifferent to the girls’ orphaned gazes . . .
Today we’re featuring an excerpt from Preston L. Allen‘s forthcoming novel, Every Boy Should Have a Man. Every Boy Should Have a Man, which Kirkus Reviews hails as “a nimble fable whose bold narrative experiment is elevated by its near-biblical language and affectionate embrace of our inherent flaws,” tells the story of an earth in […]
Read an excerpt from Even in Paradise — the latest from award-winning author Elizabeth Nunez — along with a short statement from the author on writing the book.
Matty saw the asshole as soon as he climbed over the fence from Volunteer Park into Lakeview Cemetery. Butchie was waving, like an idiot, right where he had told Matty to meet him: Bruce Lee’s grave at two a.m. Like he had to wave, like there’d be anybody else but Butchie the Rat by Bruce Lee’s grave at two a.m.
He walked over to the asshole. “Where’s my cat, Butchie?”
Allison sits in the breakfast room and watches the cardinal pair, male and female, dipping in and out of the holly bushes where they make their home. She avoids this room in the morning—too much sun. But it’s tolerable starting from early afternoon, which it now is, when she can drink her tea and look out the tall windows and watch the shadows sit neatly under the trees like coasters.
Her husband Britt is upstairs in the green guest room. Since winter, when he fell in with a new group of friends, he’s been tumbling into bed at all hours, reeking of vodka and smoke and sweat. A month ago she asked him to use a guest room on nights he goes out, and mostly he remembers. For some reason he eschews the gray one with the nautical theme and king-sized bed in favor of the mint-green one with the Colefax chinoiserie print that swathes the walls, draperies, armchair, and dainty canopy bed . . .