Jim Ruland: Off with Her Head!
(from Issue Five)
ALICE BLINKS, LOOKS UP at the circle of women looking down at her, every one of them a stranger, wondering where she is. Old, wrinkled faces creased with worry. Inquisitive little monkeys who have climbed down from the trees in the forest, only the trees aren’t real and neither is the forest.
“You don’t look so good, sweetie.”
“Just sit still for a while.”
“Are you okay, child?”
“I’m fine,” Alice says as calmly as she knows how. “I’m all right…I’m fine.” If she says it enough times, maybe they’ll believe her.
“You had a seizure,” says an old white woman with a pile of bleached white hair on her head, like the tip of a cotton swab. The other women nod.
“No…I fell….” Alice tries to suppress the panic rising within her. She cannot have had a seizure. Not here. Not now. Not again…. read more
Jennifer Gravley: The Replacement Mother
(from Issue Four)
I WAKE AND find my mother has been replaced. She looks like herself or like someone who looks like her—I have long since given up looking at my mother straight on—but she is unusually gentle with me. Not once as I slurp my milk-sogged flakes does she remind me of the toll the months I spent fattening her belly took on her career. I know from my father that she paid her company cash to erase the time afterward she spent at home with me at her breast from their records…. read more
Peter Orner: Three Stories
(from Issue Two)
The Bluff
DOWN THE ROAD from my father’s house, the house I grew up in, there’s a bluff that overlooks Lake Michigan. There’s a fence and a sign that says Private Property. But who can own a view of Lake Michigan, Queen of the Great Lakes? I’d jump the fence, the place was mine. Some prick wants to build a fence and put up a sign, what do I care?… read more
Ted Chiles: The Kims
(from Issue Six)
THEY WERE BORN on the same day at the same hospital because back then, the town was only large enough for one hospital. Both were named Kim; one from the Conger family, the other from the Conner family. Kim Conger should have been named Kimberly, but her mother was frugal and wanted to save on the monogramming. Kim Conner’s father didn’t like the name Kim; he thought it sounded too foreign. But he didn’t say anything since his father-in-law was also named Kim. … read more
Annie Fischer: That’s That Then
(from Issue Seven)
UNLIKE MOST PEOPLE, Laura and Danny upsized houses with the babies they lost. As Danny’s company grew, so did the homes, and the couple had recently taken possession of a custom-built six-bedroom in a tier of lakefront properties developed by Danny and his father. … read more
Shellie Zacharia: Now Playing
(from Issue Three)
FIRST, LET ME say this: I do not hate Jonathan Green anymore. Not in the least bit. Really. I’m over him and I’m over hating. I mean, he can’t help it that he was, and maybe still is, a weirdo collector of wine bottles and women. Or that he’s crazy. These things probably help his performances, which he says are biographically fictitious…. read more
Lee Klein: Baby Colossus
(from Issue Three)
IT WAS SO hot the summer before you were born, all I could do was play marathon sessions of video baseball. Day after day I played, amazed how the players looked like real players on real teams. But unlike with real players, I could modify the career potentials of these players so unimpressive rookies posted numbers worthy of Willie Mays. I made some trades, modified some career potentials, then led the perennially hapless Royals to 12 consecutive World Series victories. How much fun to simulate a season, win the big game, then take digital photos as the team pumped fists and a stadium exploded in fireworks and cheers…. read more
Garth Risk Hallberg: Work in Progress
An excerpt from Garth Risk Hallberg’s mammoth novel in progress. See our accompanying interview.
New Year’s Day, 1977
Wires racing along in chords and triplets, swelling every few seconds into corroded connections, weird shapes against the sky, triangles and spheres like a coded message trying to tell him something. This morning, the whole universe, the mute breadth of Long Island, was trying to tell Charlie Weisbarger something: that he was the worst kind of coward, … read more
Tao Lin: The Great American Dialogue About the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” List
(from our Issue Six essay series, The Great American Novel: An Honor Roll of Fallen Genres)
THE GREAT AMERICAN Dialogue About the New Yorker’s 2010 “20 Under 40” List will occur at a mutual friend’s 25th-birthday party near the back wall of Spuyten Duyvil’s outdoor area around 11:15 p.m. on a Friday night in mid-May, a few days after the list’s June 7 release date is announced, between two male writers (b. 1982, 1983), published to varying degrees, with an unpublished male writer (b. 1984) standing alone to the left of the aforementioned, staring vaguely at an attractive girl in the distance while lamenting his life “sort of strongly” … read more