Clik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Red Skies
Good Luck: Episode Fifty A day before the end, I forget. It’s warm and the sky is deep red and the clouds roll slowly by. My coworker climbs up on a flatbed truck and lies down and looks up at that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
An Excerpt from Kevin Bigley’s Forthcoming Novel, Comaville
Preorder Comaville from Clash Books. Josh Husk awoke in a bed that had once belonged to him. The sun peered through the nearby window, gently stroking his face. He lay there for a brief moment,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Eviction
Good Luck: Episode Fifty-One My psychiatrist was dressed as a sad clown. Rainbow wig. Greasepaint. Bells on his shoes. He answered the door and asked me what I was supposed to be. “Stanley...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rewilding
Good Luck: Episode Fifty-Two The man didn’t know. He didn’t know who he was. He didn’t know where he was. Or when it was. The room was dark. Someone was snoring on the other side of it. He lay there....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Close Calls
So I’m sitting here. Doing nothing. Waiting for the worst to happen. Actually, I’m lying on my back on my bed. Most comfortable position for me when I’m lying down. Though it’s not easy getting up...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Trying
Good Luck: Episode Fifty-Four Yesterday, at work, my bald coworker told me about the worst haircut of his life. How he had known it was going to get fucked it up before it happened. As he walked...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Katherine
Katherine has these two glorious biceps—huge biceps—big biceps like two best friends who would tell you what she was really thinking when she wouldn’t. One time I drove to Katherine’s house and saw...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bleeding & Laughing
Good Luck: Episode Fifty-Six The sun slipped down over the treetops, I misjudged my step, fell into the river, was washed away. The trick was to cross farther up where the water was shallower, but...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Five Versions of My Husband
Version 1 This version of my husband moved out of his house and into me in the early 1990s. It was love at last sight. He was not the man I wanted but he was the man I got. My name in this...
View ArticleClik here to view.
About Moms
Will never forget the day dad talked over mom at a dinner party. That night she drugged him and split his tongue with a straight razor while my sister and I watched. “You see that, kids? Your father...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Arrows
Good Luck: Episode Fifty-Seven Now I will get to the battle part. I hope I tell it all right. I am not very good at writing action scenes. How are you at reading them? Earlier this year, I was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Budwulf
Good Luck: Episode Fifty-Eight translated from Old English by Frances B. Grummere & Bud Smith LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings of spear-armed New Jersey, in days long sped, we have heard,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How I Got My New Truck
I’d been watching prices on Car Guru for a few weeks. Waiting for used Fords to come down, waiting for dealers to put some up. Waiting and just looking at pictures of trucks while sitting on the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Two Quick Hitters
Pop-Tart Guy Look I get Giving people their space. Being respectful of communities you entering. Not imposing. But that don’t mean don’t engage. Or it could mean: Not engaging, out of fear of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Last Memories
Good Luck: Episode Fifty-Nine My good memories and I were still in that house, hiding out behind the velvet curtains of the theatre where I’d gotten married. Any minute the doors would burst open and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Line (the Guards & the Men Upstairs)
In front of me, stands a man that looks exactly like I do. Behind me, is another man who looks exactly like myself. In fact, stretching before and behind me, as far as the eye can see, are men who...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Demolition
Good Luck: Episode Sixty So we set off to demolish my house of memory. I drove the bulldozer. Rae squeezed in beside me. Jackson rode in the bucket of the machine, laid sideways, head on a pillow....
View ArticleClik here to view.
GOOD LUCK
Below are links to all sixty episodes of Bud Smith’s Good Luck serial. Butterfly – Episode Negative One Popsicle – Episode One Turkey Baby – Episode Two Elegy – Episode Three First Memory – Episode...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Three Episodes in the Life of a Mental Health Professional
Tie a Tie Russell cannot tie his tie and cannot accept that he cannot learn it, that this part of his brain is just gone. In the bathroom mirror, I watch his fingers fumble with the tie as the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Das Erbe Von Freud
everybody always thinks i’m lying about this dream but i’m not: the dream is me standing next to a long pole that looks like those things on the boardwalk with the bell on top and the weight on the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
An excerpt from Mark Gluth’s Come Down To Us
Below is an excerpt from Mark Gluth’s new book, Come Down To Us, available now from Kiddiepunk. Order your copy here. I. The night sky hung above the sea with arrant darkness that the water’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Slow 9/11
“Can you describe a time when someone betrayed you?” This question is posed to me by Jan during a round of The Ungame, which I play over lunch with a group of colleagues in our architecture firm on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fresh Noodles
We met at the Family Forever Noodle House in Riverhead in 1983. Does the name ring a bell? Despite the suburban setting, in those days it was not actually a place for families, nor was it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Plausible Deniability
He asked me if I made it home okay in such a caring, fatherly tone I got turned on. We met in a writing workshop. He critiqued one of my stories by saying, “You’re very good at individuating based...
View ArticleClik here to view.
An Interview with Mary South
Mary South’s You Will Never Be Forgotten is an excellent collection of high concept short stories, usually having something to do with the intersection of technology and being human—energetic...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A conversation between Thomas Moore and Mark Gluth about their new novels...
Mark Gluth <markegluth@gmail.com> Jul 4, 2020, 1:10 PM to Thomas Hey Man, I thought I’d kick off our conversation if you are ok with that. When I think about Alone I think it is a very self...
View ArticleClik here to view.
All The Americas: an Interview with Kristen Millares Young
I first met Kristen Millares Young at the venerable Hugo House, a central hub of literary life in Seattle, WA where she was Prose Writer-in-Residence from 2018-2020. I’d driven up from Portland to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Two Short Stories
A Voyeur Mr. Adams was our seventh-grade woodshop teacher. He lived on the hill with his wife and two kids. He had a false eye and once showed us a video of himself riding a homemade hovercraft on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Real Big
Trey and I were walking to the liquor store to buy potatoes, three for a dollar, and a guy at the body shop yelled ‘Looking sexy, girl’ out of his greasy car window and Trey told him to fuck off and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
An Interview with Michael Bible
A few weeks ago, it was Michael Bible’s birthday. His girlfriend Kelsey got him a landline: red and corded, like the one from Dr. Strangelove. We conducted this interview over that secret line,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
I Want to Kiss My Neighbor
I want to kiss my neighbor. He is a bald, lanky old man who lives directly next door to me. He lives very alone, except for his tiny dog named Princess. Sometimes I hear screaming outside my window,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Webs
A hot woman followed me on Twitter, but it seemed suspect. I clicked her profile. She was a barista in LA who wrote screenplays. Attractive. Funny. Definitely not real. My friend Jenn texted me to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Life is a Death Sentence: Jon Lindsey and Lindsay Lerman in Conversation
Back in October of 2020, Brian Alan Ellis sent me Body High, Jon Lindsey’s first novel. Brian was excited for his press (House of Vlad) to publish it, and I was excited to read it. The cover is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Andre Dubus III
I have never read Andre Dubus III, but I did once sit next to him on a bench on Remsen Street in Brooklyn. Understand that I have nothing against Andre Dubus III, nor am I uninterested in Andre...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“Bathroom Footage from Michael Bloomberg’s Limestone Mansion” and other...
[Below is an excerpt from Brooks Sterritt’s new novel The History of America in My Lifetime. Get your copy here!] The first powder they provided for our enjoyment sharpened something inside me,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
It’s a Me
I usually think people hate me which is why when Mario hadn’t texted me since I’d rejected his poem, I thought he hated me. But it turned out he didn’t hate me, he’d just killed himself. Not to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Where Am I
I was doing the thing where my mom was on the phone with me so I was walking laps around the neighborhood. I get pretty sick of being in my apartment. And I need the exercise. I hadn’t been home in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Inelations of the Everyday: an Interview with Garielle Lutz
It’s hard to say when I read Garielle Lutz’s work for the first time. I know that a professor suggested Stories in the Worst Way. But I think I already had purchased Divorcer by that time, though I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
An excerpt from Adam Soldofsky’s forthcoming novella Telepaphone
Below is an excerpt from Adam Soldofsky’s forthcoming novella, Telepaphone, which includes illustrations by Axel Wilhite. Preorder your copy here. Before we were friends I used to watch him,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tandem
Honk if God exists but we don’t. He eyed the wooden blocks, once painted red, now wood-colored again, returned to their natural state by several childhoods’ worth of wear. They are going for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cheerleader
My brother Eddie called me the next morning to report his head hurt and his wallet was nowhere to be found. He already pinged the hotel but they didn’t have the wallet, or at least claimed they...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Last Short Story
translated from the Norwegian by May-Brit Akerholt Dear editor, I know you’re waiting for my last short story but, unfortunately, I have to disappoint you. It’s taken me more than five years to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Language on the Page: an interview with Robert Lopez
I first read Robert Lopez’s work a few years ago online. His was just the kind of writing you hope to find on the internet: visceral, immediate, somewhat shocking but with a deceptive attention to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lanyards
The day before I left for camp, my therapist asked me—point-blank—if, given the chance, I would have sex before marriage. Just like that. I wanted to be offended at the given the chance part, but...
View ArticleClik here to view.
High School Mixtape
Side 1: He was always a freak / He never tried to fit in / He head butted his rival / He wrote a story about a serial killer / I saw him shoot a squirrel with a bb gun in second grade / He ate lunch...
View ArticleClik here to view.
On the Possibilities of the Short Novel: A Conversation between Ravi Mangla...
In putting together a syllabus for a creative writing class, my wife was recently poring over lists of classic short stories and came across Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Whether Henry...
View Article--- Article Not Found! ---
*** *** *** RSSing Note: Article is missing! We don't know where we put it!!. *** ***
View Article