George searched his pockets for change, cluttering the counter with lint and pen caps, a crumpled tissue, pausing to clean his glasses while the tobacconist waited at the open register. It was the tobacconist he cared about, not the neatly lined cigars he had thumbed through moments earlier. George could see the smoke shop from his kitchen window, and last week had watched the tobacconist as he emerged and stood on the street corner in a pouring rain, until his coat was drenched through and rain … [Read more...] about The Tobacconist
Jaws
That's the book she cracks as soon as she's fought off her little brother for the back. Not a hatchback, that is a decade in the future, but the way back, where the station wagon's nasty final seats never get pulled up into position, the one with the backwards view, her preferred. The roads to the north are pretty straight—what is there to bend them?—and except for a series of smooth dips that everybody shrieks through, flat as the pancakes she had for breakfast. Perfect for extreme terror on … [Read more...] about Jaws
Online Fiction Interview: Terese Svoboda
Peter Benchley's 1974 novel Jaws tells the story of a menacing great white shark that terrorizes the fictional Long Island town of Amity, NY. In 1975, Steven Spielberg turned it into what was, for a time, the highest grossing film at the box office. If Benchley and Speilberg's Jaws has a topical and tonal opposite, it just might be Terese Svoboda's tale of a weird, dark family road trip that we published as our May online exclusive. Also entitled "Jaws," Svoboda's story is as naturalistic as … [Read more...] about Online Fiction Interview: Terese Svoboda
Things American: Baltimore Authors Respond to the Death of Freddie Gray
Baltimore’s bus benches are simple, utilitarian things: just two molded concrete end-pieces and seven wooden planks that you wouldn’t think much of were it not for the slogan embossed on the slats of the backrest: “Baltimore: The Greatest City in America.” It’s an odd sentiment, not because there isn’t a lot to love about Baltimore, but because it seems less a statement of greatness than it does a statement of defiance. As with so many other American cities, Baltimore has famously and … [Read more...] about Things American: Baltimore Authors Respond to the Death of Freddie Gray
Online Fiction Interview: David Naimon
David Naimon's "The Battle" is an oddball buddy tale of sorts set in a Black Sea bunker in some not-too-far-off future. The stakes are high—international tensions run deep as global warming has opened the arctic to shipping lanes—and Sergei, Naimon's protagonist, is charged with monitoring the progress of Russian submarines as they stake claims on the seafloor. This story has the distinction of being the ASF online exclusive in which the least actually happens, and yet, as Naimon told us in the … [Read more...] about Online Fiction Interview: David Naimon
The Battle
The voice crackled through the oxidized copper grill. “What do you see?” it said. “It’s important that you tell us exactly what you see.” But Sergei didn’t look at his screen. Instead he wiped the aspic from his drooping mustache, closed his government-issued lunch pail and glanced over at Ivan asleep at his joystick. Sergei swiveled his chair and nudged the back of Ivan’s with his boot. “Listen to this,” Sergei said. He nodded at the disembodied voice, at the filament’s twisting blue … [Read more...] about The Battle