“Shame and living, living with it, living through it, living past it. This is what these stories are made of.”
(reviews)
“I look up to those people who have nothing at all but their own body, which is used to the core: the rickshaw pullers, the sweepers, the mothers in rags…”
(fiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“I collected dresses many sizes / Larger, dreamed of all the bodies crowded into those // Forms.”
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“Outside, harmonious cats / tread the pathway.”
“One of the biggest things that I think about when I’m writing is trusting the reader,” Giada Scodellaro tells interviewer Erik Noonan.
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“From space you can see the shimmer / of the thousands of immigrant children / wrapped in tinfoil sleeping on the desert // sand”
“It felt good to be in their brainy female world, which defied the patriarchal Latin culture under Franco.”
(nonfiction)
Paula Carter, author of No Relation, whose essays have appeared in The New York Times and Kenyon Review, has won the Another Chicago Magazine nonfiction award for her essay, “Correction Lines.”
The roof soars so high above the sky’s hanging at arm’s length / And you, dear, are now drunk on a thousand glasses of wine
“Looking up / the wave of your gaze arrived / upon my shore.”
He demands I be a man. What is it to be a man? I ask him.
“In this story, day zero is when I live, and you die.”
(fiction)
“for just a moment I lived / through what they may have felt”
“Am I with you, my son, in eternity, / though linear time is all I see?”
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“When I got out of work a giant pizza was on my car, covering my windshield, covering my roof and the glass of the hatchback.”
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“my only scar from childhood / is a two-inch stripe on my knee from changing / baby siblings on the floor”
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“The lion tells them that he knows a field of green pasture where they can feed to their fullest.”
(poetry)
Scars are better than photographs / to remember things by.
Hurston consistently drew attention to herself in her ethnographies and included the dialogue of her interlocutors, thus eschewing the objective and distant narrator perspective.
(reviews)
There’s joy on Easter, and that joy lasts a long time. And Lent, it’s not about food, it’s about self-sacrifice, humbling yourself before God. You’re saying, You’re the big guy. I’m the small guy.
You tell me to keep my ass out of the road, and to stay the hell away / from the poison ivy and Virginia creeper because my skin reacts to / everything.
It doesn’t matter which language you speak, because language does not influence your way of thinking.
The Friday after Johnny was caught cutting up his Adderall, the AC unit in the teachers’ lounge broke.
(fiction)
When my family was escaping, my great grandmother saw that all of the grain that was collected from them was being thrown in the sea.
She only recognizes the girl in her photographs. // The boy I am recognizes her in photographs.
The older generation of course, they didn’t teach their kids about the horrors of Stalin, because they didn’t want them to have that memory.
(Dispatches from Ukraine)
He remains in place next to the stove, watching everyone, observing their flaws.
(fiction)
There was an air alarm, so an ambulance couldn’t get to us and bring this child to the hospital, so we decided to treat him right there.
(Dispatches From Ukraine)
the cup’s round mouth // gives a satisfying quiver / between the teeth
I told my wife I was opposed to leaving Vinnytsia. She said, What happens to you, happens to me.
(Dispatches from Ukraine)
just a slight breeze, early in the morning / as you lie asleep and the bulb / you planted pushes through the soil
Now I remember it like a dream, but it was terrible.
(Dispatches from Ukraine)
Grigor, as everyone who met him agrees, had been dropped on his head as a baby. Or else nursed on straight vodka.
(fiction)
The rage rolls out of my gut like a stream of regurgitated frogs, leaving me purged and primed for violence.
(nonfiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“The next morning, my training began at Achieve English. In a week, I was teaching. I’d never taught anything.”
(fiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“We didn’t think to ask / what we might lose, / what it would cost us”
Four poems by Alain Mabanckou, translated from the French (Congo-Brazzaville) by Nancy Naomi Carlson
He rejects the idea that Humankind descended from the apes, otherwise why has he, the gorilla, remained at the animal stage?
(poetry)
“If I go into the forest, I can hear the birds and crunching of the leaves. It’s about the sound of the whole forest, not isolating the sounds,” Janice Lee tells interviewer Margaret Juhae Lee.
“wind unravels the light / seeks a face / for the coming storms”
“Because what she wanted was the kind of radiant glamour that her mother possessed, that she lived and exuded: a rarified air of such pure grace that only a handful of humans might possess it.”
(fiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“I fell in love with a sweet-lipped / bitter-eyed / girl from Balkh”
(poetry)
“Being a mother is dynamic, and the dynamism of motherhood lends itself to narrative,” Julie Phillips tells interviewer Margaret Juhae Lee.
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“mixed chalk with oil / twirling brushes / making clouds talk”
(poetry)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“We washed our hands vigorously after reading all these things. We wiped down our doorknobs and our computer keyboards.”
(fiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“The rooms become increasingly more expensive, as one gets closer to the Abyss.”
(fiction)
sharp lady heels sinking into the future // drawn fatefully in my tat of moth lace
(poetry)
I can finally legitimately stroll into a Victoria’s Secret looking for a bra-and-panty set for myself and not pretend to be doing Christmas or birthday shopping for my wife.
(fiction)
This is the first piece in our new DEBUT section, which showcases the first literary work published by a writer, beyond a campus-only magazine.
“There were no pens allowed at Carrollton Springs because of the possibility of someone hurting themselves with one”
(nonfiction)
Another Chicago Magazine 