“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 Last Moments of a Brave Mouse” by Ahmed Shaker, translated from the Arabic by Essam M. A-Jassim
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)
“With therapists like this, who needs parents?” reviewer Natania Rosenfeld asks.
(review)
We can’t all be like Lotta Tornberg, environmental crusader. I, for one, never had her strength and confidence, her resilient spirit. She remained optimistic to the end, certain that her peaceful protests, with the speeches and marches and sit-ins, would actually make a difference.
(fiction)
It’s the last corner of paradise, here, evaporating like spit on a hot sidewalk.
(nonfiction)
Oak Woods Cemetery is located in the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Grand Crossing, and the Confederate Monument towers over the gravesite of the Chicagoan suffragist and anti-lynching activist Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, a former slave.
(nonfiction)
After a moment of ‘studying,’ Horsecollar said, “That’s a mighty iffy saying of Lincoln’s, but it makes a lot of sense.” He slightly nodded, but I wasn’t at all sure we understood one another.
(fiction)
Red’s may not have been nice, but it was ours.
(fiction)
“I was in the convent at the time. I knew that I was lesbian. I was twenty-six. I was in a new program that allowed us more latitude than your ordinary canonical novice has. I had heard about, probably read an article in the newspaper, about this uprising, and it’s as if it drew me – not the riot, but the act of rebelling,” Ginny Apuzzo tells Tamika Thompson.
I didn’t used to tell the ski jumpers about the time they have to endure at the top, but in the more than thirty years I’ve worked at the Lake Placid Olympic Jumping Complex—meeting the competitors at the base of the K-120 long jump and directing them to the start—I’ve come to realize that it’s better to get this information on the table immediately. Otherwise, they grow restless. We all do. And that’s when the real accidents happen.
(fiction)
Another Chicago Magazine 