One. I’m in a yellow highchair, the same color as the sculpted carpet. In front of me is a cake, frosted to look like flower petals. I don’t yet understand ...
‘That’s what girls with powerful fathers do.’ A slave for ever dilutes with dignity the fiction of love. The truth of this is spectacular. That even the mechanism of nature ...
The night A.W. thought he won the megabucks he flicked on a small lamp in the corner of the room and rushed a Yuengling from the fridge. After a clack, ...
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America, that slippery beast. One nation, one constitution, one currency: a framework for arguably the most diverse, remarkable and undefinable country in the world. But ...
So I was a counselor at a summer camp. Not the kind of camp you see in the movies. It was on an island; stranger still, an island smack in ...
I love you. These simple words knock against the inside of his head the same way police knock. Hard. Loveless. I love you. He sits in a backward chair by ...
‘Excuse me. Does this train go to Ames?’ Taeko Endo asked a woman reading a newspaper in one of the seats near the door.
‘Yes, it does,’ the woman answered, smiling.
Taeko ...
Amboy is a place in the Mojave desert, about 200 miles east of Los Angeles. I hesitate to call it a town: undoubtedly that’s what it used to be, and ...
On mornings like this as I drive toward work at 6:21 am
4th Street stretches ahead
without end
as I stick my arm out my window and roll back
my ...
I grew up duck hunting. Which I never really liked because you had to wake up at some obscene hour, wade through a freezing swamp and sit in a dark ...
It took the combined efforts of Rich and MacPherson’s maid to pour the little man into his clothing. They shuffled him out the door braced between them. The windows were ...
The American roadtrip: a life-defining journey, racing along the desert highways to the leafy green of the National Parks or to the sky-scraping cities. It’s delighted writers and artists for ...
Nick drives the green-and-gold Gennaro Financial Recovery Chevy to the levee but, it being August, the levee is dry. The moment the name and address came in, Nick said he’d ...
The wind from the Pacific was stronger and cooler than the time of year suggested it might have been. Salt sea wind and hot sun burned pale skins, and caught ...
Our books and screens are filled with tales of growing up, missing buses, getting dumped, being cheated, winning at sports and realising dreams. In fact there’s so much that sometimes ...
“New York” is Sabrina Mahfouz’s first ever piece of short fiction and is from a collection called So, Here I Am.
Yeh so they shot him. You heard he’s dead. Yeh he’s ...
Film adaptations are becoming a very common trend, but where are all these stories coming from? Here are five books written by British writers that have made it big on ...
The winner of our What America means to you? competition is @georgiamagpie:
America is my mythical journey to make, an endless desert highway, the magnitude of landscape, of possibilities and ...
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He wasn’t sure if it was rude or not, leaving the club mid-conversation, but that stupid fucking song about being a firework had just started to play again and he ...