Story

Detour

By Joyce Carol Oates,

Too early for spring, you couldn’t trust such blinding-white sunshine in mid-March. And the smell of damp earth thawing, reviving—too soon. Abigail was feeling light-headed. Unreal. A seismic sensation, as…

The Very Beneficial Changeling Society

By Jesse Ball,

I am a member of the Very Beneficial Changeling Society. Perhaps you have heard of us? We love our name, the Very Beneficial Changeling Society, because it indicates in some…

The Souvenir Museum

By Elizabeth McCracken,

Perhaps she should have known that she would find her lost love—her Viking husband, gone these many years—in Sydesgaard, on the island of Funen, in the village of his people.…

New Poets

By Michael Deagler,

The Dogman snuck back from the bar with two Kölsches and stuck one in front of me. An old gesture. Old for us, old for history. “I quit drinking,” I…

The Work of Art

By Namwali Serpell,

The exhibit had been up for three weeks when the trouble started. As soon as Cliff arrived at the gallery that afternoon, Georgina got up from the stool where they…

Nobody Gets Out Alive

By Leigh Newman,

Getting past the mastodon took planning. The great plated skull was wedged between the fireplace and the credenza, leaving the two ivory tusks splayed across the carpet where a coffee…

Annunciation

By Clare Sestanovich,

The first time she flies home for the holidays, Iris makes two friends. She is seated between a married couple, because the woman prefers the window and the man prefers…

Terrace Story

By Hilary Leichter,

The old window gave a grand view of Yellow Tree, trunk to branch. They called it Yellow Tree even though the ginkgo was yellow for only about a week each…

I Incriminate Myself So No One Else Can

By Fiona Maazel,

The child is scared. Shrieking. She cannot get down. The child is four, in a whorl of terror. The mother is livid. Screaming. She thinks the child is weak, girly,…

Padua, 1966

By Lisa Taddeo,

Miranda was tall and as dark-haired as they come. I say was and not is and that is inaccurate because she is still around and I really am not. She…

The Fifth Step

By Stephen King,

Harold Jamieson, once chief engineer of New York City’s sanitation department, enjoyed retirement. He knew from his small circle of friends that some didn’t, so he considered himself lucky. He…

The Interpretation of Dreams

By Stephen O’Connor,

It is 1924. Günter Zeitz is thirty-three years old. His hair is black, unruly. And, in the manner of certain very tall men, he habitually hunches his shoulders and lets…

The Whale Mother

By Susan Choi,

As promised in the email she’d received, the shuttle was waiting at the curb outside baggage claim. It was just a minivan, it turned out, not the wheeled and finned…

The Red Dot

By David Means,

That night at the window, looking out at the street full of snow, big flakes falling through the streetlight, I listened to what Anna was saying. She was speaking of…

Carlitos in Charge

By Alejandro Varela,

I was in Midtown, sitting by a dry fountain, making a list of all the men I’d slept with since my last checkup—doctor’s orders. Afterward, I would head downtown and…

Who Is She?

By Catherine Lacey,

I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t get up—just couldn’t get up, couldn’t get up or leave. All day lying in that median, unable. Was this misery or joy? It’s happened to…

The Alps

By Colin Barrett,

A Toyota HiAce with piebald paneling, singing suspension, and a reg from the last millennium rolled into the parking lot of the Swinford Gaels football club late on a Friday…

Marmalade Sky

By Nell Zink,

On a November Saturday in 1990, Pam went over to Joe’s place to listen to records. It was raining in sheets that whipped around the corners of buildings and blowing…

The Maid’s Story

By Adam O’Fallon Price,

The Gersons were a fairly unexceptional family. The maid had idly observed them upon their arrival at the Hotel Neversink as she vacuumed the length of the third-floor hallway. The…

The Unexpected

By Joyce Carol Oates,

“Thank you for the honor. I am very—honored.” You have been instructed to remove the clumsy black mortarboard at this point in the commencement ceremony. Now you incline your head…

Setting the World to Rights

By Amos Oz, Translated by Nicholas de Lange,

All his life he lived on hatred. He was a solitary man who hoarded gloom. At night a thick smell filled his bachelor’s room on the edge of the kibbutz.…

Run Me to Earth

By Paul Yoon,

They were released. For the first time in seven years, they stood outside in the courtyard of the reeducation center. They looked across at the gate. They remembered none of…

First Daughters

By Lucinda Rosenfeld,

Bianca White, dressed in cream, was the first to arrive. All morning, she’d been looking forward to her lunch date with Ainsley Burton. In addition to being Bianca’s estranged best…

Addie and the Chili

By Lydia Davis,

Years ago, Ellie asked me to write the story of our friend Addie and the chili. The incident involved some bowls of chili, and more than one woman crying, in…

The Ultimate Warrior

By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

I had finished lunch when I decided to attend the memorial service later that afternoon for Juno Wasserman, who had died the week before, just shy of seventy. Juno had been…

Come In, Come In

By Fiona Maazel,

Her bathroom was a wreck. This tiny, ruinous space. The contractor had tiled the walls askew and had to start over. He’d set the tub askew and had to start…

They Told Us Not To Say This

By Jenn Alandy Trahan,

The few white boys in our town could ball. Breakaway layups, nothing-but-the-bottom-of-the-net free throws, buzzer-beater fadeaways. They slept with basketballs in their beds and told us about their dreams. We…

Plante’s Ferry

By Jess Walter,

After Bonin liberated the Scots’ pelts, we rode the lower trail until we come to a ford in the river where the Frenchman run his ferry. But the barge was…

I Do Something That I Don’t Understand

By Mary Gordon,

Today I did something and I have no idea why I did it. I followed someone, two people actually, but it was the woman I was really following, the man…

Slingshot

By Souvankham Thammavongsa,

I was seventy when I met Richard. He was thirty-two. He told me he was a young man, and I didn’t respond to that because I really didn’t know what…

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