Nausea knocked around my empty stomach with nothing to temper it. This woman looked just like the Wikipedia image of Edith Wharton I fell asleep to. Was I seeing pixels come to life? No. I needed to get a healthier sleep schedule now that Ramadan was over, it was clearly affecting my brain.
(fiction)
“We see these policemen over here…” The intersection above them was lined with uniformed police in crowd control gear. “…surrounding our demonstration. They say they’re here to protect and serve, but who are they protecting? Who are they serving?”
(fiction)
“I think that the beauty of Blackness and Black people is that we code-switch all the time. We just know how to talk depending on where we are and to whom we’re speaking, so I don’t think about it too much when I’m writing, but I do think about who’s going to be on the inside of the stories and who’s going to be on the outside,” Amina Gautier tells ACM.
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
Anika had, Leo knew, a harder time in the uprising than he did. She was working as a junior reporter at the morning Szabad Nep when the soldiers came, not a good place to be. She hid in the storeroom behind a trashcan for three hours listening to the shots, the clatter of shell casings on the linoleum.
(fiction)
The often pitch-perfect language captures the absurdity of the way we live now and renders it hilarious: “I fought a monster and defeated it. I did that. But what do you do with that? It’s not something I can post about on Facebook. I mean, my mom would see that.”
(reviews)
The collection’s opening salvo asserts this tension in a whiplash, maximalist mad dash. Stories steer their readership past one visceral image after another: burnt oil engines, boiled feet, metallic screams, and fast food mutilations.
(reviews)
Danielle Steele’s Going Home, Alice Munro’s Dear Life. Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Ali flips open a moldy Farsi translation of The Three Musketeers, his eyes landing on “All falsehood is a mask” just as a slip of paper glides down onto the library’s patchy carpet.
(No Place is Foreign/fiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
After descending into the basement, you act as if you never went, as if you have no idea what the basement really is or what happened there. Even though you left the girl you once were in the basement, you spent the rest of your nights pretending it didn’t happen.
(fiction)
When my father measured women in percentages, I learned to chart myself like livestock—head, pelvis, torso. Yet the red horse leaned his warmth into me, the chickadees sang, and the body refused to stay math. Years later, back home, I discover what love weighs when you stop counting.
(fiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
He had written DECEASED next to my mother’s name on his return. That threw the whole system off, sending his return into the void for further review. Since the entire IRS was working from home due to Covid-19, which arrived approximately two weeks after my mother’s death, apparently every day was now Leap Day, and perhaps in another four years my father might get his refund.
I am sorry to say this, but what if You made a mistake?
What if You took the wrong kid?
I heard You took two more kids today from Askar’s middle school.
Are the soldiers working for you?
(Palestinian Voices/ fiction)
I would need help to enter, hesitatingly, into my mother’s sick body, to bite into her cancer, twist it every which way, let it melt on my tongue like a communion wafer, pierce it with my teeth and let out all its juice, its pus, lick my fingers. It would definitely taste like something unfamiliar, but I’d continue, that’s how the abscess would burst, how I’d heal my mother, how I’d heal from my mother, it would be enough for me to swallow her whole, she would be in me, and I’d spit her out again to rid myself of her.
(fiction)
“An eleven-year-old girl sees something no child should—and keeps her silence. In a world of broken promises and simmering class tension, what she witnesses becomes a secret weapon in a household on the brink.”
(fiction/No Place is Foreign)
I’ve never thought of myself as someone with a scar, but in this portrait, the damage from a dog bite is clearly visible next to my nose. A dent, a scratch, and a bump, a kind of trinity.
(fiction)
“As it relates to Unit 29 specifically, writing offered a rare opportunity to convey a message that would actually be read. For some, it was an opportunity to attempt something they never tried before. The act of writing and the program itself allowed for a structure by which they could order their lives in a chaos that barely ever sleeps,” Louis Bourgeois tells interviewer Mike Puican.
And upon learning the true purpose of the miners, we Chiricahua forced abandonment of the Santa Rita del Cobre copper mine for decades. Ultimately, it was we Chiricahua whom the US Army, acting as agent for mining interests, did their best to kill in the nineteenth century. “But we’re still here,” Vic said and let that stew.
(No Place is Foreign)
The room dark and emptied now, Elisha sits alone in the first row looking up at the piano he’s filled with ghosts.
(fiction)
I wasn’t blameless. I’d slammed doors, I’d yelled. One time, I threw a plate against the wall and it shattered. But when someone hits you, you leave. That’s what you do, even if no one else loves you but your cat.
(fiction)
Has our attempt at diplomacy boiled down to arms shipments alone? We, like the Ukrainians, just want to raise our children, and have prosperity without greed.
(nonfiction)
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
“We can recite the Preamble here,” my mother said.
“Who would hear us?” I asked.
“We can say it to the sky.”
(fiction)
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
Her father had always believed in fairness, in giving people a hand up instead of—or maybe in addition to—a handout, in the kind of society where the strong should lift up the weak.
(fiction)
This is the first in our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
Unhappy with the garbage they were given, here they all came to exchange it for different garbage, and to perfume the warm December air with exhaust.
(fiction)
They stand in silence for a few minutes. Then his mother, in a whisper, exhales “shaman,” elongating the last syllable as if blowing cigarette smoke into the air.
(fiction)
On the last page of Eveline’s printed homicide story, she has scribbled, “The story might not follow the rules, but I got your attention, didn’t I? You’ll always remember me.”
In the morning, you paced the sand like you were trying to find stable ground. “I am in control,” I thought I heard you say. You did a meticulous job of packing up our tent.
(fiction)
Medellín is a dreamscape. It’s a parlor show best accompanied with multiple soundtracks. It’s part paradise, it’s part fevered hell, it’s all forms salvation.
(fiction)
He is free, Bexley thought, free enough to float on that breeze, rise and soar with seagulls if he wanted to.
(fiction)
My mother was certain my brother had planned his own death, but she wasn’t sure how he did it.
He wonders if his life has been a lie. Was he ever really a selenophile? Were the yearly parades a waste of time? The protests. The fights for equality.
(fiction)
Sudden understanding has snapped me from her side like a branch from a tree in strong wind.
(fiction)
Another Chicago Magazine 