He thought of his family: how his mother had been locked into grief about something she couldn’t name and was passionately present or strangely, remotely apart; how his father …
THE PAINFUL AND THE THREATENING: an interview with Maria Takolander
WILL HEYWARD I recently read your story A Roānkin Philosophy of Poetry (winner of the ABR Short Story Prize), which takes the form of a monologue. The story is ironic, …
Instructions From God (Maria Takolander)
1. Clothe yourself in sky, gag your greedy mouth, and with a stick brush the barren dust you walk lest you tread on a single creature of mine for …
The Fourth Bus Stop (Peter Farrar)
The bus rumbles under him like a rushing heartbeat. He reverses, watching the cyclone fence edge closer in the trembling rear vision. “Yosi!” shouts the supervisor. “We can probably …
03 by Jean-Christophe Valtat (Ben Carmichael)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010 Translated from the French by Mitzi Angel The unnamed narrator of Jean-Christophe Valtat’s 03 is a seething mind. His thoughts, which comprise the novella’s uninterrupted, …
The White Silence after the Full-stop: Jean-Christophe Valtat's 03
Review by Ben Carmichael The unnamed narrator of Jean-Christophe Valtat’s 03 is a seething mind. His thoughts, which comprise the novella’s uninterrupted, paragraphless soliloquy, obsess over such topics typical to …
The Game (Irma Gold)
Abby is tall and lanky, taller than all the boys and skinny as all hell. Every afternoon she pegs it down to the wreckers to play with her brother Dan …
TWO STEPS FORWARD: an interview with Irma Gold
The world of literature is filled with personalities. Yes, that’s an inane sentence, but let me explain. The world of literature – perhaps the arts in general – is jam-packed …
Parrots (Paul Hetherington)
Beaking and clawing, they strew the ground where the glimmer of oil and hallucinations of petrol leak towards a broken bicycle frame. Benny threw it down, stripping the wheels, …
What Will It Take? (Gabrielle Bryden)
What does it take to get a bed in this place? You can come back if you have tried to kill yourself. How many nights will that get me? One, …