In the afternoon, I was usually lying in the hammock reading Don Quixote while avocados fell on the roof and the grapefruit tree blew its scent around the yard. Bougainvillea and jasmine grew on all the walls, and several varieties of palm snaked up in the sky. The medians were a riot of rosemary. I remember oleander and trumpet vines and sidewalks littered with jacaranda blooms. Hibiscus and giant agaves. Bella donna. There was a tree that made wooden flowers; I have one still, years … [Read more...] about The Sun and the Pacific, Flowers
short fiction
Lesser Missiles
https://soundcloud.com/americanshortfiction/kathryn-savage-lesser-missiles We smelled smoke and, out the window, embers rose in the night. We got out of bed and pulled the red alarm box in the hallway and went outside. From across the street, we watched fire destroy our apartment building. The woman who lived down the hall from us wore a nightgown and fanned herself with a magazine and shook her head. We found a motel nearby, mostly used by military girlfriends and wives. Then we walked … [Read more...] about Lesser Missiles
Embracing the World, from High to Low: An Interview with Benjamin Hale
In his first story collection, Benjamin Hale introduces us to characters who inhabit the margins of society: an expat outlaw revolutionary trying to find her way home, a dominatrix confronting a new possible role as mother, a performance artists eating himself towards death. What at first may read as absurd becomes meaningful and then moving through Hale’s skillful and playful storytelling. We reached out to Hale to talk about his writing process and his new collection, which was published … [Read more...] about Embracing the World, from High to Low: An Interview with Benjamin Hale
Your Father
https://soundcloud.com/americanshortfiction/daniel-lopilato-your-father/s-gyGsG All of this is occasioned by a telephone call from my dad: I sit down on the couch, flip on the tube, and descend the cable channels to the low double-digits, where I find the red-jowled faces of men trapped inside too-tight sport coats going on at length about this player or that, and I know I’ve landed on the run-up to a baseball game. I have an immediate gut reaction to these men because, as it happens, I’m … [Read more...] about Your Father
To God Belongs What He Has Taken
https://soundcloud.com/americanshortfiction/jensen-beach-to-god-belongs-what-he-has-taken Marie buys her morning coffee at the convenience store on the corner of her block. One of the men who works there is named Ahmed. He is Iraqi. When he laughs, which he does often, his enormous belly shakes. She likes Ahmed. She’s been buying her coffee from him since she’s lived on this block, almost two years. In a week, the sale on her apartment, her first, will be final, and she and her daughter Tove … [Read more...] about To God Belongs What He Has Taken
Nota Bene: Nat Baldwin Has Been Feeling the Bern Since, like, 2002
Nat Baldwin's been writing, performing, and recording music for virtually all of his adult life. In addition to playing bass in Dirty Projectors, Baldwin has recorded half a dozen solo records that put his upright bass and his vocal range on full and incredible display. Baldwin's also a fiction writer, and in the past two years, he's published stories in PANK, Timber, Alice Blue, and Sleepingfish, among other journals. Like his music, his stories present a complicated world populated by … [Read more...] about Nota Bene: Nat Baldwin Has Been Feeling the Bern Since, like, 2002