This is the sixth story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. You can read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction stories from 2017 and 2018, here. The first one takes you back to his place, on Mandell. He asks you to top him and you do and that’s it. The second one chats you […]
Around two-thirty on Wednesday afternoon, a maintenance man at the Radisson Hotel near El Paso’s airport hurriedly climbed the stairs to the roof of the building to watch as Air Force One touched down. Having the President in El Paso under the circumstances, the man, who is Hispanic and asked not to be named, told […]
“What’s your full-length crossword answer?” might be the introvert’s “What’s your karaoke song?” These are the words that span all the spaces in a crossword-puzzle lattice, a chance for solvers to revel in their skills and creators to show off their personality. The crossword constructor Aimee Lucido tells Liz Maynes-Aminzade, in the above video, that […]
My mourning mind, compromised and searching for coincidence, processes the age Toni Morrison was when she died, eighty-eight, as two infinity signs, straightened and snatched right-side up. If we are Morrison-fearing, as some others are with their icons, well, we were socialized by her novels. What an experience, to be mothered on one plane by […]
Slap me in the throat and shriek, “Someone’s coming to get you!” Tell the class about a great new job opportunity you just heard about. It involves standing quietly in the woods during the day and training with an adult a-capella group at night, but applicants must have strong thighs. Say something about toxins. Anything. […]
In the fall of 1993, my coursework, as a Princeton sophomore, included an introductory survey of British literature, an intermediate lesson in Latin, and a seminar, with Toni Morrison, titled Studies in American Africanism. I have no specific recollection of the first two classes, beyond a vague bodily sense of the classrooms themselves and the […]
The photographer Guanyu Xu grew up in Beijing, the only child of traditionally minded parents. They raised Xu, who is twenty-six, in an apartment on the seventeenth floor of a military-housing complex; Xu’s father worked for the army. As a teen-ager, Xu recalls, he was forbidden from hanging posters on his bedroom walls. Instead, he […]
Martin Luther’s Posting of the Ninety-five Theses Before he can reform the Roman Catholic Church, Martin Luther must first fight off ninety-five yakuza disguised as priests. After defeating them all, Martin hammers his Ninety-five Theses onto the door of the Fatburger on Cahuenga Boulevard. All Ninety-five Theses simply read “Fuck you.” The Assassination of Abraham […]
The Vermont Public Radio podcast “Jolted,” from late last year, provides an in-depth look at a mass shooting that was averted—a planned attack on a small-town high school—and of the ways in which the narrow escape began to change the state’s seemingly intractable public conversation about gun control. Vermont, though politically liberal in many respects, […]