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‘Moldova’

by Ruth Madievsky

Posted on by John McMurtrie

Sasha and I landed in Kishinev as the sun was rising and took a bus from the tarmac to our terminal. I hadn’t slept on either of the flights and felt the edges of reality ungluing. The bus was stuffed to the windows with blue-eyed children waving American coloring books, women in sweatsuits carrying knockoff

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The Bus

by Nishanth Injam

Posted on by John McMurtrie

The bus has a bathroom. Other buses that leave Bengaluru for my hometown don’t have bathrooms. They pull over on the highway when you have to pee, or they stop at a dhaba and the driver asks passengers to go so he won’t have to make extra stops along the way.The bus is a luxury

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A Conversation with Kathryn Ma

by John McMurtrie

Posted on by Zack Ravas

The title of Kathryn Ma’s new novel, The Chinese Groove, refers to one young man’s fanciful term for a silent understanding that he believes unites Chinese people across borders and throughout generations. This code, he is convinced, is what will guide him as he leaves behind a life of poverty in Yunnan Province and embarks

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The Y

by Bethany Ball

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Back then, Yale sat behind the front desk counter in the resident section of the Y and I sat beside him. Reggie worked maintenance and had the gray cast and steady hands of a true alcoholic. He was always on time and reliable. Robert was a resident and lived on the sixth floor. He had

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After Dark

by Rhoda Huffey

Posted on by Zack Ravas

When the pigeon first appeared in my front yard, I noticed because he didn’t fly off immediately. He walked over to the jade plant by my front porch and contemplated the leaves of the succulent. My mind was full of other things at that moment: what to wear to that evening, did a man named

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Obverse

by Yuri Herrera

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Translated by Lisa DillmanAnd that was why they decided to go off and explore the other side, on which, they hoped, there would be no watery cliffs or dragons awaiting them at the end.They traversed iotas and iotas. Deserts of iotas and dales of iotas and mountains of iotas. Millions of iotas. Until, finally, once

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Flat Map

by Yuri Herrera

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Translated by Lisa DillmanPerhaps they could have saved the lives of all those who died chasing the truth to the ends of the earth if they’d thought more about, say, the thickness of trees. But these people, like all people, felt compelled to see things with their own eyes, which would later be eaten by

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On the Art of Interviewing

by Michael Krasny

Posted on by Zack Ravas

I learned an important lesson interviewing David Byrne. He was (and is) an artist I respect and admire, but he was a terrible interview. Monosyllabic grunts were what I got from him as well as a clear indication that he simply did not want to be there, in the studio, being interviewed. Sometimes you can

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May 17th, 1974

by Dagoberto Gilb

Posted on by Zack Ravas

“Slauson,” Sherry said. “Doesn’t that sound…maybe Watts, like that, to you?”“What?” Danny said making the word shorter than it already was.“It’s kind of a ghetto name, right?”Danny might have looked up and away irritated if he wasn’t driving her car. Slauson was the name of the street they were on, wide and industrial, gigantic warehouses

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The Murmuring Killed Me

by Peter Orner

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Every few years or so I go to visit my dead at Beth El Cemetery in Fall River, Massachusetts. It’s across the street from a Cumberland Farms. My grandfather always said that being dead didn’t seem so bad if he could run over and grab a pack of cigarettes and the Fall River Herald. On

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Part of a Deer

by Lucy Corin

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Here it was suddenly ninety degrees, and across the country it was suddenly frozen. I’d been texting about it with Basil all morning, getting my stuff together for running errands. In the car, I swapped into my sunglasses, setting everything up to follow the driving instructions I’d texted to myself by trying to balance the

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The Immense Presence of the Mist: Q&A with ‘The Red Arrow’ author William Brewer

by Kristen Iskandrian

Posted on by Zack Ravas

It’s probably fitting that I thought often of Keats while reading William Brewer’s The Red Arrow (Knopf; 272 pages), specifically, the odes, all of which seek to create vessels into which the unknowable and unnamable—the “alien corn” of existence—can be contained. Brewer is a poet, after all, whose brilliant collection I Know Your Kind, about

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