Two weeks after accepting the job, in November 2014, having grown a goatee, pulled the plugs from my earlobes, and bought a beat-up Dodge Ram pickup, I pull into Winnfield, a town of approximately forty-six hundred people three hours north…Read more
Discover Great New Writers
SELECTION FROM
There There
Tommy Orange
The Drome first came to me in the mirror when I was six. Earlier that day my friend Mario, while hanging from the monkey bars in the sand park, said, “Why’s your face look like that?” I don’t remember what…Read more
SELECTION FROM
Heavy: An American Memoir
Kiese Laymon
ou stood in a West Jackson classroom teaching black children how correct usage of the word “be” could save them from white folk while I knelt in North Jackson, preparing to steal the ID card of a fifteen-year-old black girl…Read more
SELECTION FROM
A Place for Us: A Novel
Fatima Farheen Mirza
They are all waiting on the damp lawn for the sky to light up, at a park near their home on the Fourth of July. How they got there is a miracle. It is the first Fourth of July Hadia…Read more
SELECTION FROM
Bettyville
George Hodgman
In Missouri in springtime, the rivers rise and the rolling fields stretching acres and acres, miles and miles, gradually go green as the farmers fret over the wet ground, wondering when it will be dry enough to disc and get…Read more
SELECTION FROM
The Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins
I can hear the train coming; I know its rhythm by heart. It picks up speed as it accelerates out of Northcote station and then, after rattling round the bend, it starts to slow down, from a rattle to a…Read more
SELECTION FROM
Shame and Wonder
David Searcy
I have this story from the artist Tracy Hicks about his former father-in-law, who had a 1960s pickup he’d restored and customized—spent years on the project, loved this truck like nothing else—until one day he backed it over one of…Read more
SELECTION FROM
The Given World
Marian Palaia
They say our early memories are really memories of what we think we remember—stories we tell ourselves—and as we grow older, we re-remember, and often get it wrong along the way. I’m willing to believe that, but I still trust…Read more
SELECTION FROM
In the Land of Armadillos
Helen Maryles Shankman
At around two in the morning, my mother shook me awake. The Messiah was coming. There was no doubt about it, he’d been spotted ten miles outside of Włodawa. At this rate, he would be here by daybreak. Get up,…Read more