Authors
Fiction
Colonel Hammer glares, willing us to attention. A few pilots sit up.
Masterpieces
I thought how she must thrash with savage agility when she made love.
Story of the Week
“Clean up this mess!” I tell the woman. “How can you live like this?”
Story of the Week
Marshall and Mrs. Checchi, it seemed, had this philosophy in common.
Features
We lived below the poverty level. I wasn’t allowed to desire objects.
Poetry
Lately it’s getting harder to say the true thing, to find solace in nature.
Readers' Narratives
He handed us sticks of dynamite, rolled in wax paper like taffy.
Fiction
Karen was, in that moment, nothing, emptiness. She was oblivion.
Nonfiction
After days of torture in secret prisons, they were about to let him go.
Story of the Week
Most people come to Africa because they are drawn to its misery.
Features
It was the sixties, and I was in
college and incredibly restless.
college and incredibly restless.
Poem of the Week
Sing so dogs bark, oxen bolt. Sing so a girl walks out on her lover.
Story of the Week
Barth looked after his students beyond anything expected of him.
Story of the Week
I was opposed to the taking of human life. I was opposed to all war.
Narrative Outloud
I returned to Vietnam with a tape recorder to collect ca dao.
Story of the Week
Kids were just let out of school to spend the summer running in packs.
Poetry
The dead and alive who we will never see again but in dream or memory.
N30B Winners
The first rule of the house is that everything must be even stevens.
Fiction
It was as if the stranger in the train carriage had taken out a knife.
Fiction
Love is trickling into Lady’s heart where usually there is only fear.
Story of the Week
Over the air conditioner, she hears, unmistakable, the bleating of a siren.
Poem of the Week
Anchored off Biscayne Bay my father’s wooden skiff swings easy.
Poem of the Week
Without a working title, a poem could muddle meaning, confuse purpose.
Poetry
Refuge, Your church is often a house. Your Word is a house.
Poem of the Week
I was created in His image I had dominion over every thing
Poetry
Einstein postulated that space and time sit neatly on the same fabric
Poem of the Week
You can dive still see half the Spanish castle, its stone pile a trap
Story of the Week
Say what you will, a human being has the right to their own body.
Fiction
There’s no way to escape a storm at sea; it hits you, and you can’t hit back.
Nonfiction
Advance planning was never Hank’s strong suit, he had to leave her.
Nonfiction
Any white man without a servant was presumed to be in need of help.
Nonfiction
Buster’s reasons for looking after Marco weren’t entirely altruistic.
Nonfiction
The hut was cluttered with the skulls and bones of small animals.
Nonfiction
I found it impossible not to imagine a radiant future for myself.
Nonfiction
Lust for power and money undermined their morality and common sense.
Nonfiction
I rented a house in the woods of East Hampton as a form of therapy.
Fiction
My father was at an awful disadvantage in a sport where cunning is a virtue.
Nonfiction
I was convinced she’d be back in the morning, like the sun.
Nonfiction
Trump reminded me of the guys I grew up with on Long Island.
Nonfiction
The clock kept ticking, and the investors bailed out one by one.
Nonfiction
These adventures taught me that writers are flawed human beings.
Nonfiction
That autumn, my first in San Francisco, I ran short of money.
Story of the Week
I felt awful about imposing on him, but I was desperate to see the Derby.
Story of the Week
The streets were filled with couples and families on their way home.
Nonfiction
I received a surprise invitation to a tryout camp at Ebbets Field.
Nonfiction
If I weaseled out of Bible study a little early, he’d speed me to the gym.
Story of the Week
There were more whispered speculations about his relative sobriety.
Nonfiction
“Werewolf Seized in Southend!” “Man Who Made Love to Pavements!”
Nonfiction
The thought of entertaining our relatives filled me with horror.
Nonfiction
His thoughts are never far from the erotic as he roams around Dublin.
Nonfiction
In Florence I gained a sense of how I might want to spend my life.
Story of the Week
I broke up fights, bandaged cuts, fielded calls from parents, and sat with the sad or depressed.
Story of the Week
Part of my desire to be in London related to its writers.
Nonfiction
Fitzgerald was about to turn thirty and felt the press of time.
Nonfiction
What humanity needed was that gravity-defying miracle, the bird.
Poetry
He tuned the future backward as he left the ringing water to reclaim me.
Poem of the Week
Charge the ground till it glitters. It was God’s pleading in that rink.
Poetry
My “lonelymaking.” Also known as my horrible secret, continent-wide.
Poem of the Week
The canary-yellow sweater she knit while pregnant with me thawed first.
Story of the Week
We were aiming for a complete transformation of society.
Poem of the Week
I shoved them one by one, easy as pie yet with care, just shy of mercy.
First & Second Looks
The moon and sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on.
Poem of the Week
She’s not the same, her body more naked in its aging, its disorder.
Poetry
Break me like bread. Take me apart. Strip each rib down to light.
Poetry
I could feel the floor’s slight pitch. We were in for a long, long voyage.
Poem of the Week
The man protested, I didn’t do anything. He needed the job. I only kissed her.
Poetry
It could be our baby. Her eyebrow, its perfect arc, the pale blue vein.
Fiction
They caught those few of us left unclaimed by the one emotion, or the other.
Fiction
I don’t think I was very frightened. I was simply hungry for home.
Fiction
In exchange for our labor, we would each be given a new set of clothes.
Features
The slow-falling leaves contain the space of the story I’m pursuing.
Narrative Outloud
An owl, as large and incongruous in the night sky as a flying man.
Narrative Outloud
There’s this cool magazine online. They let people read it for free.
Narrative Outloud
An owl, as large
and incongruous in the night sky as a flying man.
and incongruous in the night sky as a flying man.
Narrative Outloud
My own hunger was for a reduction in the vast space between people.
Narrative Outloud
My own hunger was for a reduction in the vast space between people.
Nonfiction
The danger was my own carelessness, and now I was waist deep in it.
Story of the Week
People only see that side of him. He is still a boy, learning to be a man.
Fiction
The pain lithified to numbness, and she recalled the time of his courtship.
Story of the Week
I’m just wired hard for hunting, and not so much at all for fishing.
Nonfiction
We loaded the packs and started down, into the bluing of dusk.
Nonfiction
An eye trained only for darkness makes for a lesser path, in art as in life.
Nonfiction
We serve them far more than they serve us. Service animals, we all are.
Fiction
What would make a sane person want to watch such blood sport?
Nonfiction
I want to focus on bears. On knowing them, and on what they need.
Story of the Week
With my lime-green nitrile gloves I carried him around to the others.
Fiction
Everything they needed was there. Everything they needed, they had.
Story of the Week
Devanand Simon was twenty-five when the bodies fell from the sky.
Story of the Week
“Mom, don’t you think the fucking racism is worse than my profanity?”
Fall Contest Winners
I was creating art instead of counting beans like everyone else.
Story of the Week
Byron’s mother read things to him: Language is fun. Play. Let’s play.
Fiction
Perhaps he was not almost sixteen years old, but thirty-five and sick.
Fiction
They wrapped him in bandages from all three kits. The old man watched them.
Fiction
He sees the slight swelling of her breasts in the open collar of her blouse.
Fall Contest Winners
Her previous existence seemed unreal, now, a faint rumor.
First & Second Looks
He moved quickly, as if running from what he had just done.
Fiction
Eight years, and she was ready to call it quits. They were both ready.
Fiction
Oh, how did people do it? How did they find some way to be happy?
Fiction
She’s innocent, guilty of nothing but the need to be admired.
Fiction
My wife fell in love with a dancer. A woman. I came here to get away.
Fiction
Divorced. Wife living with someone else. Pregnant with his child.
Fiction
The man lifted his shirt just enough to show the handle of a pistol.
Fiction
At straight-up noon, the honeymoon was ruined, one day in.
Fiction
Here they were, two surviving soldiers from opposite sides.
Fiction
“Can’t you see Hemingway’s having breakfast with his grandson?”
Fiction
“She was breakable, and I probably knew it from the start.”
Fiction
She sips the coffee and thinks about throwing herself off the balcony.
Fiction
“There’s got to be some way through this,” he says, “without losing her.”
Story of the Week
References to and portrayals of hypocrisy, moral sloth, venery.
Fiction
There in front of the house was his son’s ratty old Thunderbird.
Fiction
Marie was therefore exiled, as it were, like Cordelia in the old play.
Narrative 10
I wish I could tell her that we aren’t supposed to know why we’re here.
Poetry
I could throw one of these rocks at the moon and watch it fall.
Fiction
I put my hand on my stomach and had an image of the melting snowman.
Fiction
She had a situation where she’d lost her driver’s license for speeding.
Interviews - Audio/Video
An in-depth audio interview with Ann Beattie on her writing.
Narrative Outloud
Ann Beattie in a wonderful reading of her story “Find and Replace."
Features
What can be done to interest a younger audience in fiction?
Fiction
This is not America! It is not the America I grew up in, it’s
a joke.
a joke.
Narrative Outloud
He was just a bully, uncivilized, out of control, and wanting to lash out.
Narrative Outloud
He was just a bully, uncivilized, out of control, and wanting to lash out.
Narrative 10
I’m obsessed with finding a convertible that has enough room.
Fiction
He glowered even as a little child. Maybe because he has your bad eyes.
Fiction
Edward the Funny didn’t have much to laugh about in his midthirties.
Fiction
It was like a scene in a movie; it didn’t seem real. The man kicked her.
Nonfiction
Peter Taylor’s stories are jigsaw puzzles of nuance and suggestion.
Nonfiction
Order gardening clogs, then realize you feel like a runaway nurse.
Nonfiction
This is a crafty story and things are not what they seem to be.
Fiction
From the roof, my husband observed daily a man and a woman having sex.
Nonfiction
The story is filled with demarcations, limits, invisible as well as overt.
Fiction
When an adult falls, children are stunned and cry, “Mommy! Mommy!”
Story of the Week
His mind was a glass vase shat-
tered into pieces across the floor.
tered into pieces across the floor.
Readers' Narratives
The lot was well maintained, with all the biodiversity of a golf course.
Photography & Art
Havana, Cuba, on the inevitable cusp of change. A photo gallery.
Photography & Art
Hemingway’s Royal typewriter sat atop a volume of Who’s Who.
Story of the Week
I hang there, upside down, watching Bronwyn, her face beatific.
Story of the Week
“Hey, you look lost,” the hunter had said. “You better come with me.”
Winter Contest Winners
I can see on him how things are changing for and against us.
Poem of the Week
You’re certain that they’re harmless, benign as a flock of founding fathers.
Poem of the Week
It’s a small deposit, but I’m putting my faith in reincarnation.
Poem of the Week
Once I took it in my mouth, I had to admit pity tastes like sandwiches.
Poetry
Little footage, this plot, where it thrived at first, then ghosted away.
Poetry
It was the season of storm delays, of . . . shame and ghosts on trains
Poem of the Week
Purple planets, dirt stars. Imagine the carom in the hall, how it sounded.
Poetry
Sing to your sisters in the water, let your arms and lashes flutter.
Poem of the Week
I bought two for my wedding, planted them in pots on the patio by the pond.
Poetry
There was a fish. And then there was the consciousness of robots.
Poem of the Week
It’s life that is hard: sleeping, eating, loving, and dying are easy.
Poem of the Week
Watch out. That we thought him gone only proves his wily knowledge.
Poem of the Week
We need a silvery stream that banks as smoothly as a plane’s wing.
Story of the Week
I yell at the boys: “What are you doing! Are you out of your minds?”
Fall Contest Winners
She’s young and lovely in a mad, disheveled way, and hard to resist.
Story of the Week
How did I ever survive? Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I died back there.
Poem of the Week
Across sage flats, tundra, and bleeding hearts, she escapes.
Classics
After her divorce she took up with a cowboy named Wicks.
Fiction
Be honest. Writing is about honesty, and articulating that honesty.
Narrative Outloud
Be honest. Writing is about honesty, and articulating that honesty.
Story of the Week
Something is wrong with that place. Someone’s still there . . .
Story of the Week
It seemed that someone had died, but really it was part of us.
Fiction
The cat was looking at me with an intelligent expression. It knew.
Fiction
On the small of my daughter’s back is a two-inch tattoo. MADE IN CHINA.
Six-Word Stories
Lovers, a new set of six-word stories from Elizabeth Benedict.
iStories
I love you to distraction, she would say. I love you beyond love.
Fiction
Now he was all out of dreams, out of rage, expectations, and money too.
Nonfiction
I was happy I had no one to talk to, to be alone. Happy to be in the hospital.
Fall Contest Winners
“You see,” Sister Elba said, smiling, “you should never doubt him.”
Poem of the Week
Lunatics call it annihilation . . . Think of it as not doing a thing
Poem of the Week
Lean close and kiss each other: dig down as far as down goes.
Graphic Stories
A romp through everyday dramas with Hemingway, Kafka, and more!
Spring Contest Winners
I looked out at the busy world, and I saw nothing but its ugly bones.
Fiction
Three months is a long time to be away from the person you love.
Story of the Week
Tobacco and dirty wool, rank alcoholic sweat. I liked him right away.
Story of the Week
There’s something about traveling by plane. People tell their secrets.
Poem of the Week
The orderlies see him in the mirror and mistake it for his twin.
Narrative High School Writing Contest
She unhooks the sapphire pendant from its stand. Slips it into her pocket.
Story of the Week
I reviewed the rules for myself, among them: stay in the moment.
Classics
My mother and I remained apart. My father came late to the party.
First & Second Looks
What I have learned as a farmer, I have learned also as a writer.
Story of the Week
The survival of our world depends upon the cultivation of better language.
Poem of the Week
Desperately, children: I am in desperate need for desperate need.
Poetry Contest Winners
When I was a woman, I was all reason and my reason was unjust.
Poetry Contest Winners
I dream we ride together in a Subaru to the county fair.
N30B Winners
Your soul feels old and familiar like a book that opens to my favorite pages.
Story of the Week
I offer you these outs, and it stings when you take me up on them.
Story of the Week
She was painting a bedroom, trying to be a good mother, wife, Catholic.
Story of the Week
There was a blue wool afghan draped across the back of the couch.
Story of the Week
The purple-eyed women on her mom’s side began generations ago.
Poem of the Week
The fog’s sheen is a mirror: my mother sees the terrain of the future—
Story of the Week
Jane’s made it clear, this Renuka might not even become a doctor.
Fiction
“Aren’t you full of surprises,” Talinda would have said. If she had known.
Poem of the Week
End of October, days recede quickly into night. Leaves fall in slow motion.
Narrative 10
I’ve read this novel at various stages of my life and I feel as if I know Isabel.
Story of the Week
I’m trying to decide if I’m too cold to be curious, when the box meows.
Story of the Week
How different they were; how comfortable he was that.
Poetry
Why not keep singing when another car pulls up to the light?
Poem of the Week
Be glad the numbness in your legs isn’t reading on your face.
Poem of the Week
How do we get there, to where we can answer what the jingle is asking.
iPoems
let me fall through some small bore into your tiny breathing eden
iPoems
It’s raining concrete. I bite my grief wetly. Who will test these chains?
Classics
The eyes looked into his own with a meaning, a malign significance.
Poetry
I never entered no-man’s-land by any light brighter than the palest moon.
Narrative Taste
Dining at Bocuse wasn’t about food, but about pleasure in all its forms.
Poetry
I have tried and failed to renew my vows to real trees whom I love.
Poem of the Week
Sweet breath hard breath. Every breath a stone-cold bird in thaw.
Short Shorts
“I have a sneaking suspicion that we’re the same person,” she says.
Poem of the Week
The meeting hall of their bodies piled on lawns caked with dying birds.
Short Shorts
His eyes, dark brown and unwavering as he delivered the details.
Poem of the Week
We went flying without a map as naked astronauts often do.
Poetry
Isn’t it nice to think tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes yet?
Story of the Week
Derek was holding a gun. The barrel was pointed at his own temple.
Story of the Week
Writing at night just feels . . . sneaky. There’s an outlaw quality to it.
Fiction
Wake up drenched in sweat, with fatigue that reaches to your marrow.
Poem of the Week
Why don’t we just get drunk and walk down the middle of Fifth Avenue.
Poetry
You linger in the dimming aftermath, grayer and fainter than a breath.
Poem of the Week
Surrender me to shallows and the salt gallop of a rising surf.
Poetry
They cut you off, let fall your hammered silver bracelets to the sand.
Poem of the Week
All that I’ve had, I’ve left propped up in a glass vase: cut stems at rest.
Poem of the Week
Sound the flute! Now it’s mute! Bird’s delight, day and night.
Story of the Week
“Who you kiddin? There’s no middle class anymore, we’re all just poor.”
Poetry
How do we bury
the dead stacking up against our picture window?
the dead stacking up against our picture window?
Poem of the Week
Here is where you touch the world and here are the words to feel its heat.
Poem of the Week
Severe knobs of head and tail: one a horn of venom, the other masked.
Poetry
Brassy bullets fell against the floral comforter like little candies.
N30B Winners
do you asks pretty sue know what I love what pretty please tell us
Poem of the Week
Omens from the Lord, or Nature, the clouds, some darker silhouette.
Poetry
Love I know is the husk caught and throbbing under your gums.
Poem of the Week
You remind me of lizards birthed in an outhouse by an ogre or a loon.
Fiction
My father stood up, unable to choose which one of us to kill first.
Fiction
My daughter’s favorite game is Holocaust. She’s quite inventive.
Narrative 10
This is kind of a big, wet valentine, isn’t it? Shouldn’t you throw it out?
Fiction
I open the door and Eleanor is leaning against the wall, paper white.
Nonfiction
Those moments are all I want. I want a life of this. He sighs and I sigh.
Nonfiction
Eating a raw oyster is like exchanging a soul kiss with the sea.
Poetry
What’s left is a thumbhouse, an inch of gristle inside skin walls.
Story of the Week
I have given everything at the wrong time, to the wrong people.
Fiction
Suddenly, all of the past seemed now like the same endless race.
Story of the Week
The band was amateur at best. It didn’t matter. People loved them.
Story of the Week
Mom often went to work on her days off. The library was her refuge.
Story of the Week
Mostly, 90 percent of the time, the big ones trigger the bad attacks.
Poem of the Week
Two surgeons vaulted over a counter to hold open my incisions.
Poem of the Week
The noiseless trees, the insentient breezes that are not there.
Poem of the Week
I have seen your ocean. I have heard your waves beside my bed.
Poem of the Week
Every voice an epitaph, and then a little tune from the neighbor’s yard.
Poem of the Week
When I cast my vote, I become just that tiny, abstract, lost, and essential.
Poetry
They need to be named, loved, then unnamed to be seen once more.
Poetry
A ripple across the darker fathom, no sooner there than torn away.
Poem of the Week
Hard to know what a prisoner believes, what the guard presumes.
Poetry
I told kids I didn’t feel a thing there anymore, but it was a lie.
Poem of the Week
I lost my pen, I lost my keys, and my hat somewhere on a table.
Poetry
A simple line of raging wet nearby, how as a kid I pictured the Nile.
Poem of the Week
The past, you hear it, the small hours, sucked down the undertow.
Story of the Week
Children, this is what a bad dream looks like, our teacher said.
Poem of the Week
The rings of Saturn flash their nothing yellows, nothing blues beautiful.
Poetry
It’s the human genius of reproducing not quite exactly.
Nonfiction
Expulsion. He was out, his course set. One word can turn the key.
Story of the Week
Poetry can open. Is there a case for poetry in this plague year?
Story of the Week
Sudden camera blurs, blackouts, audio hiccups, silences.
Poetry
Some asshole on a joyride in the outback runs her down, the emu.
Story of the Week
The wind was like a girl sobbing out her story of betrayal to the stars.
Poetry
Two bikers, the bartender, me, and a skinny girl in skintight blue jeans.
Poetry
The coverage of the state funeral, black horse bearing an empty saddle.
Poetry
I listened all my boyhood, but my listening couldn’t save me.
Poem of the Week
This was still the sixties, and a girl in shop was way beyond him.
Poem of the Week
A family altar stuffed with dead family hanging now above the TV.
Poetry
I have to wait till day to tell you that you’ve sunk down below sea level.
Poem of the Week
Surely a million mothers and school teachers can’t be entirely wrong.
Poem of the Week
With your hands in the air you held an infant tightly, trying to save it.
Classics
The ideal way of presenting character is to invite perception.
First & Second Looks
A smell of shut-up apples and soap filled the room. There was nothing.
Story of the Week
She wondered if tomorrow would fill her with so strange a stirring.
Classics
The distant past returned—what part of it, he could not decide.
Poetry
All over the planet people try to end pain: striptease, bee stings.
Story of the Week
Young people have a gift for reviving freshness of language.
Story of the Week
I was thinking sex, she was thinking sex, but neither of us made a move.
Fiction
The most arcane sexual practices could arouse me from my torpor.
Features
Not a single environmentalist holds out much hope for the future.
Fiction
Today was the first day of her new life, and she was on an adventure.
Story of the Week
“Hey, babe,” he said, breathing into the phone like a sex maniac.
Fiction
We began to obsess over water, where it came from, where it was going.
Fiction
This is the worst moment of her life, maybe of anybody’s life, ever.
Fiction
He’s not the skinny hippie all the paintings make Him out to be.
Narrative Outloud
The girl marched directly up to me, glaring, and said, “You hit my dog.”
Fiction
Joanie’s face was something she’d borrowed from Miró, from Picasso.
Fiction
“Whoa, look—the monkey prof. Can you believe it? He was just on TV.”
Fiction
“One of my genetic gifts, and don’t you want to know what the other one is?”
Fiction
She’d seen snakes before, but she’d never really looked at one, until now.
Story of the Week
“You’re going somewhere now,” he said. “Up to the big smoke.”
Winter Contest Winners
Her appearances are fleeting, a gust of air, a murmur in the night.
Story of the Week
The architect is twice my age and owns an ivy-covered house.
Winter Contest Winners
They drink hard liquor and growl about which musicians are hot.
Fiction
Her cheek was like a plum about to burst and you had to close your eyes.
Story of the Week
“I hope the scumbag rots in jail,” he yelled into the quiet night.
Fiction
He spoke of the river’s origins as though telling of the birth of a god.
Story of the Week
The three of us share a myth, that I’m fragile as old bones.
My parents speak in low voices—about me, I’m pretty sure.
I watch the waitress, trying to remember how to flirt. I take off my mask.
Story of the Week
That late afternoon in the park, with its kiss, wasn’t an ending or a beginning; it was both.
The piano had been a great bird rustling and swooping in the vast space.
Poem of the Week
We hung our posters at the drugstore, at the grocery, at city hall.
I tacked up a 1970s Earth Day poster from my mother’s classroom.
We tie-dyed shirts, and I bought everyone a plastic visor to paint.
Poetry
A bunny the size of a teacup feasts in the clover, ears lit up in salt-pink light.
Nonfiction
The onus is on you, because you care about your car and your life.
iPoems
This belief. This clinging-to. Vanity. Like painting the wind’s back.
Poetry
We might have seen it coming, had we not had our eyes fixed on it.
N30B Winners
I keep waking up on the edge of the black lake. He’s on the other side.
Poem of the Week
There, in the courtyard, a man might sit and call himself your friend.
Poetry
It was as the angel speaking of Isaac, a deception, a test to survive.
Poetry Contest Winners
On a scale of 1 to 10, the pain dissolves like a Eucharist wafer.
Poetry
As a child I wanted to behold the elusive squid, the patience of eels.
Poem of the Week
That’s how we knew our belonging and how we knew it wouldn’t last.
Poetry
Before giant pandas earn heir name, they cub pinkly and mewling.
Poem of the Week
The mirror will flow and the heart will set like glass in the frame of his bones.
Poem of the Week
It was cool and dark, azalea in bloom at the edge of the forest.
Poetry
Pinned to the wall, it looks uncannily its own language, trick of the camera.
Story of the Week
“Dorm whores” his roommate calls them. They come for the booze.
First-Person Winners
I stepped down painfully on my cracked ankle and nearly fell.
Fiction
Clayton always imagined getting laid in the rooms of his dad’s motel.
Fall Contest Winners
She had boyfriends before she met him. Well, not really boyfriends.
Fiction
Dad doesn’t believe I’m beauty queen material. I believe in myself.
Story of the Week
They retire for the night, he to his bedroom and she to hers. What of it?
Story of the Week
He cannot imagine the shape his life would take without her.
Poem of the Week
Floods of faces, no sign of a pathway toward Bethlehem, shut off by blizzard.
iPoems
The current looked cold and brown. It would freeze soon—November.
Poetry
We cling to an exact number of planets, to the Earth Our Mother.
Poem of the Week
I walk and I rest while the eyes of my dead look through my own.
Short Shorts
All night the insects’ grinding jaws chewed through the darkness.
N30B Winners
He probably had an order. Ludes, Dexis, Black Birds—who knew.
Story of the Week
The nights she and Wade have sex she can’t do so without feeling guilty.
Story of the Week
He thought about kissing her. Then he decided that she was just lonely.
Fiction
How much simpler and more satisfying was the company of men.
Fiction
Takis brought down the demons that would pursue him the rest of his life.
Story of the Week
Americans didn’t invent courage, but we are no strangers to it.
Poem of the Week
Ajax killed men
and then animals
thinking they were men.
Poem of the Week
Men like me and my brothers filmed what we planted for proof we existed.
Fiction
He never stopped reminding me that I was born in Harmony, Georgia.
iPoems
No, you may not walk there. No, you may not stand on that. He is not here.
Fall Contest Winners
Louise watched from the shadow. She was looking for somewhere to land.
Poem of the Week
I’m the shrunken dead like them, here, greening the sky’s bluer potion.
Poem of the Week
You must not be afraid of what waits after death, my past self says.
Profiles
Lee has taken on several of the great novelists of the past century.
Story of the Week
I was bold, even reckless, in what I wrote, and in how I wrote it.
Story of the Week
They are glorious pumpkin-skinned messengers. I hate them.
iStories
In Ovid’s tale, the virgin Philomela was raped by her brother-in-law.
iStories
The mortician who painted our girl was not a somber-suited officiant.
Poem of the Week
Someone seems to have made an excellent age-specific insight.
Poem of the Week
What a good time we could have if we were happy to be who we are.
Poem of the Week
Yang Wan-li said, There’s enough to eat. Who needs a lot of money?
Poem of the Week
I stop and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue, green, purple.
Readers' Narratives
We’d read the rules about what can get your kid suspended from school.
Story of the Week
I didn’t trust her. Relationships like ours aren’t built on trust.
Poem of the Week
Snows piling in his crying mouth. Cold gave him a light complexion.
Story of the Week
In a way she enjoyed the slow, sad feeling of letting it go.
Story of the Week
Until now the man had not really lived, but simply existed, to be sure.
Poem of the Week
A spider drifted down so slowly from the ceiling on a silver thread.
Story of the Week
The wild-eyed horse was more a figure of nightmare than dream.
N30B Winners
Something has to be what this is, old and primitive, and it sounds like this.
Poem of the Week
Creating so many mail merges, loading ink, unjamming paper.
Narrative High School Writing Contest
Grief is a rude houseguest. She stays up late. She leaves messes.
Fiction
I’ve got my hands around the man’s legs when I notice the blood.
Love Story Contest
She has wings of rouge on her cheekbones, her beak blood red.
Features
Writing is a subversive activity that exempts you from the rules.
Story of the Week
Try to make order in one direction, and things shoot off in another.
Winter Contest Winners
We can be naked in black light, the smell of unwash and old pot.
Six-Word Stories
Despair: Janet Burroway’s first Narrative Magazine six-word story.
One-Act Plays
It wasn’t me he was aiming at; he was using me to make my mom unhappy.
Winter Contest Winners
It dawned on me my passion was not for her but for the making-up.
Poem of the Week
The guy who drove the mother to the morgue hands him an empty.
Nostrils a little raw, displaced, conscripted, by your Shock and Awe.
Fall Contest Winners
“Mind you come straight home,” Mrs. Heywood always says.
Story of the Week
The people flocked to witness the execution of Ja’afar and his kinsmen.
Fiction
The waitress looked us over, wondering, I guess, if we were famous.
Spring Contest Winners
Men came over carrying lanterns and pulled away the chunks of ice.
Story of the Week
He can’t remember the last time they made love. It has become a game.
Story of the Week
He was living like a coyote, out on the margins. But then a letter came.
Story of the Week
The cottage stood as a metaphor for what she wanted out of life.
Short Shorts
Mama would say beware of the little flaws that make one homely.
Fiction
“Leaving for war, Hayes wept. He didn’t just cry; he wept...”
Nonfiction
Fiction, no matter how short or long, is the art form of human yearning.
Fiction
The stupider the president the more power you arrange for him.
Features
Revision is not a sanction to get the head and the will involved.
Story of the Week
With a world full of foolishly dangerous men, what’s a mother to do?
Narrative Outloud
Here I am, king of the gods, making a fool of myself just to get under your gown.
Six-Word Stories
"In County": A new six-word story by Robert Olen Butler.
Classics
I was the man in her life. I know I’m different now. Now I’m a bird.
Fiction
The allure of Mardi Gras is to feel this way: unseen and unseeable.
Narrative By Hand
The handwritten first draft pages of Robert Olen Butler's first novel.
Fiction
El Presidente was no longer in a mood to see the American press.
Fiction
A coldness bumped a last kiss upon my cheek, a good-bye kiss sliding across.
Fiction
We looked at each other beneath a London sky, on a Zeppelin night.
Fiction
Darla has come to the monument to fight against her mind.
Fiction
He does not dare to ask the question flaring in his head. Will she stay.
Fiction
The clown has taken a seat at our veranda table in absolute silence.
Fiction
After the password was given, the question remained. My name.
Poetry
You’ll find me here in the peach orchard, the most I can muster.
Story of the Week
When the doctors’ voices started turning to noise, I didn’t fight it.
Story of the Week
“And if you ever tell anybody what I’m about to tell you, I’ll deny it.”
Poetry
My bike, my skinny body, my pent breath was thrown to the grass.
