26 min read stories

Jim McCrumb always told the same stories to every new batch of student employees. Jim had been a manager at the university bookstore for a long time. He...

Eight years ago, in the Nangarhar province of eastern Afghanistan, Zakir Mohammad went on patrol with a platoon of American soldiers. Twenty-three years old,...

Someone shit in the men’s sauna again, and now the entirety of Apex Fitness smells like the aftermath of a ruptured septic tank.

Perhaps their bodies sensed the heartache ahead, the disappointment that waited—that they couldn’t hold onto this version of reality. So they let go of it.

Rusty sat behind the wheel of the bus and watched the sky turn sour. A year ago, when his father had coached the Lady Tigers, he’d been expected to serve as...

Three days shy of her fifteenth birthday, Alison Pope paused at the top of the stairs.Say the staircase was marble. Say she descended and all heads turned....

Three cars for two grownups, I thought. What a country. What a couple of selfish dicks my wife and her new husband were.

Many years after her husband had died, Nwamgba still closed her eyes from time to time to relive his nightly visits to her hut, and the mornings after, when...

The first time our house was robbed, it was our neighbor Osita who climbed in through the dining-room window and stole our TV and VCR, and the “Purple Rain”...

The woman, a stranger, was looking at me. In the glare of the hot afternoon, in the swirl of motorcycles and hawkers, she was looking down at me from the...

Here she is, on the porch, all straw-hair and slumpy joints and a crack that passes through her lip like she is dirt that has never known rain. In her arms...

As they put me to sleep, my mouth fills with the dust of the moon. I expect to choke on the silt but instead it slides in and out, and in and out, and I am,...