“At a time when the world’s focus is drawn to the humanitarian crisis of children wrenched from their parents at America’s southern border, the damage that is being done to these young psyches is immense and unknowable… Abraham’s gripping tale of innocence lost in contemporary Lagos could just as easily be set in these migrant prisons,” writes Carol Haggas.
(review)
What if, having escaped Hitler, Gidon is killed by a microscopic bug?
“If I had been chewing gum, I would’ve swallowed it right there,” Jefferson Navicky writes upon reading Maureen Seaton.
(review)
Each panel felt a little like The Decameron, where we listened and told stories while the weight of the plague swung over us like a poorly-anchored chandelier.
(nonfiction)
“Whether V’s and June’s story is your or my family story,” writes Chelsea Biondodillo, “it is still our story and it should rattle and anger even as it hollows out a soft spot in the heart for these fierce and sorrowful unsung stories.”
(review)
“Love As The World Ends”
“If This Next Apocalypse Gets Canceled Or Postponed”
(nonfiction)
Michael McColly writes: “Farber states what is obvious for anyone who’s spent any time or been affected by America’s massive prison industrial complex: ‘Sometimes, we need to stare at the drear reaches of our national soul to understand who we are and who we wish to be.’”
(review)
“Would you like to go for a dinner, let’s say in one or two months, if restaurant will be reopened by that time?” I imagine he would ask.
(nonfiction)
And I was looking for barbarians. I still am. I always am. I’ve seen so many. Haven’t you?
(The Loop)
“With composed brevity and a hip, off-brand optimism, Polek mines a bottomless crevasse of depressive inclinations and self-imposed disembodiment,” writes Loie Rawding.
(review)
I turn around and gain elevation so I won’t be tempted. It’s her turn to hunt.
(fiction)
Mary Ann seemed more at ease, and eventually turned to Greta to ask, “Does your son obey you?”
Greta smiled, “No. Does anyone’s?”
(fiction)
Professional Skills: Steel-driving, of course
(fiction)
ACM is pleased as punch that we get to publish Leanne Grabel’s work every month.
(The Loop)
“Diehl and Goodrich bypass the tedium of lesson preparations to make their school settings deliciously weird,” Jason Teal writes.
(review)
The mouse saw the Ghost of Death approach him as the humans struck him with the shoe, stick, broom, and a series of quick kicks.
(fiction)
“The poem lingered in my mind for weeks not because of its timeliness, but because of its unsettling brilliance,” writes Jefferson Navicky.
(review)
So here I am writing about it in America.
(nonfiction)
“The most fantastic element of the book isn’t the religion or the space travel but the way people behave,” Alder Fern writes.
(review)
“Exchange of Glances”
“The Creature”
(translation)
The stories in this collection are varied in narrative voices but uniform in the quality of the telling, review editor Patrick Parks writes.
(review)
As children under Nixon and teens under Reagan, first-wave Generation Xers like myself have spent our lives watching the rout of the political left from power. Progressive reforms from the New Deal and Great Society were dismantled piecemeal to enrich a profiteering few.
(nonfiction)
I want something in return for telling you my story. I want you to remember me. I want you to say that I was a capable man.
(fiction)
Our father was a design engineer whose best invention was figuring out how to disappear.
(fiction)
Actually, don’t bother measuring. The audience won’t know how to taste for the right textures and flavors anyway. It only matters to them that it’s an authentic recipe. The only recipe that your abuela—your last known living relative and the only brown person responsible for teaching you culture—gave you.
(fiction)
“He was the president of Quordoba from the early fifties until 1981, when he was deposed,” said Jean. “Of course, he was just a puppet, Alberto Machano held all of the power.”
(fiction)
There were some things going on that passengers wanted to believe nobody noticed. There were couples swapping partners, both with and without the knowledge and consent of the people they’d arrived with. There were orgies with all kinds of drugs, especially among the senior citizens.
(fiction)
Another Chicago Magazine 