Bruno Lloret
Translated by Ellen Jones
“As I finish writing this, without knowing that I’m writing it, my mum gives me a gold crab on a chain.”
Prose
Latest Reviews
Featured Interview
Newest Essay
Nova
Veronica Wasson
“As a young man, Veronica allowed her beard to grow wild and bushy like Almighty Zeus, like a mountain man, like a drifter. With her torn jeans and scavenged T-shirts, she looked disreputable and women avoided her, but certain men were drawn to her.”
Crying Spirit
Kasimma
“Just look at you! Yes, you. Don’t even incur a slap by looking around as if you’re confused. Your senses are very much intact. Look at you, sitting on Dollar Tree’s cold ground, beside the opened fridge, breathing frosty air. The smallest bowl of ice cream sits like a lover beside you.”
Diwata, Where She Walked
Wilfrido Nolledo
“Supper the little children, an expatriate poet was to write of the population in Metropolitan Manila, 1990. And she who had just lost hers that windy November morning drifted aimlessly through the memorial grounds where she’d been cannibalizing tombstones of their expensive garlands.”
Fake Moon
Amy DeBellis
“August in Alabama: air thick with mosquitoes, crickets chirping hoarse and ragged, fireflies blinking on and off like stars gone wrong.”
Zeppole (aka Awama)
Khalil AbuSharekh
“When it arrived, it looked familiar—like the Palestinian dessert known as “awama” (donut balls), but this time topped with chocolate syrup. I took a bite. Immediately the taste transported me far, far away in time and place. I remembered I hadn’t tasted this flavor for over fifteen years.”
Excerpt from Imagine Breaking Everything
Lina Munar Guevara
Translated by Ellen Jones
“The worst thing about this story, the thing we need to remember, is that I had the money, the money to replace the printer. At some point in my life I had it, and I turned it into a tattoo, some earrings, and an avocado-shaped coin purse. You absolute mug—who the fuck even uses a coin purse?”
Five Shots of Gay Sam, 2009-10
Daniel David Froid
“The man’s identity, of course, is the whole point. But this video does not yield much. From sartorial details alone, it seems difficult to extract any further information about his life, his secret doings, or his proclivities—to derive any signs.”
Two Tales
Alvin Lu
“For there was no doubt I was being watched. The walk back to school collapsed into all that was to follow: the moment I turned on the evening news and saw ‘Uncle S—,’ my son pointing at the screen; the terrifying movie in my head of the police closing in on A—’s apartment, knocking down the front door with guns pulled…”
The Wall
Ricardo Piglia
Translated by Erik Noonan
“This fear does me in now more than anything. Before, at times, I would sometimes remember the curve and dark bulk of the freight coming toward me, I’d remember the crash and I’d wake up in a sweat then force myself to think about what I’d seen during the day, I’d remember each thing, one by one, and it was like seeing them in that very moment until suddenly, without realizing, I’d fall asleep.”
Skinny Dipping
Bailey Sims
“You know you’re really pretty.” She pinched a half-inch of fat on my side, her fingers cold and leather-soft like a doctor’s. “It’s just that college is different. Especially in California. I want you to be your best.”
Eight Quebecois Surnames
Francisco García González
Translated by Bradley J. Nelson
“The ship is the San José. The language is French. The flag that waves on the mast is the insignia of Quebec. The story takes place in the future. Proximate. So close that it seems as if it has already happened.”
On the Destructive Nature of Lava
James Nulick
“What are you looking at? my sister asked in the loudest voice possible, the abruptness of it as shocking as hearing the metal-on-metal screech of ghetto brakes when one is entering a crosswalk. Jesus Christ, Nicole!?”
About the About
Mary Burger
“Story is, you come up over the rise and the coastal meadow spreads out in front of you all the way to the cliff, the grass bends in waves and the water beyond it is a steely rippling sheet.”
Ellipse, D.C.
Denis Tricoche
“When me and Papi get home, Leo is half asleep waiting for us. He says, Veronica came by to give you something, but she told me I should only give it to you when you’re at your lowest. Not yet, I tell him.”
Excerpt from My Women
Yuliia Iliukha
Translated by Hanna Leliv
“A woman who learned how to live in the homes of strangers lost her own home twice. It all started in 2014. Weird thugs with tricolors; mad old women with golden teeth, tugging her clothes and spitting on her. She quickly wiped their spit away as if it could seep through her skin and poison her.”
In the East
John Gu
“When the offensive came, I was reminded of Mahmiin Andeyin’s words to me the previous winter: ‘Before the summer comes, they will start bombing again.’”
Fire Trances
Iliana Vargas
Translated by Lena Greenberg and Michelle Mirabella
“‘Stop talking to me in French, Lucille, as if you had no clue who I was, or what’s going on. You’re the one who went to get me from the convent. You’re the one who paid for all the damage the Mother Superior and her following say I caused, even when you knew it wasn’t true.'”
Concentric Macroscope
Kelly Krumrie
“I recorded them in the kitchen, changing clothes, washing their hands, played the sound back, and they’d write it down somehow, rerecord it. The echoes under there had to be god.”
Autumn
Juan José Saer
Translated by Will Noah
“In its essence, toponymy represents the first verbal constellation to spread over the tortuous surface of the universe, verbal projectiles that are launched by man’s codified breath and become lodged not in places themselves but in the maps that serve as their emblems.”
Pen
Afsana Begum
Translated by Rifat Munim
“Had anyone ever heard of the spirit of a discontented ghost wandering through the packed streets of an old book market when there were so many other places to haunt people? Just like there were bookworms, there were book ghosts, too.”
The Game Warden
Michael Loyd Gray
“He’d come nosing around on Saturday afternoons, this tall, red-headed warden, because he’d taken a shine to my mother and pretended to recruit me for the conservation service. Even then, I suspected that was a front, but my mother and I were dazzled by his grin and jutting chin, a man full of the outward confidence a smart green uniform and holstered pistol on his hip bestowed.”
Current and Former Associates
William M. McIntosh
“I know it was a long time ago and I know we don’t see each other or speak anymore, although we could, and I know you’ve got a lot in your life and so do I, and I know this sort of drifting apart thing is rather common and forgivable, but do you remember me? Do you think about your old life while you’re possessing my current one?”
Take Care
Laura Zapico
“Micah called my name as I climbed the steps to the Oasis and he ran to catch up, sweating, his checked flannel shirt billowing behind him. I recognized him from my last rehab, the one with the low-rent organic meals and nonstop mindful meditation. We’d barely spoken there, but I’d felt his eyes on me in the dining hall and during Tai Chi, and I remembered how it thrilled me when I felt like a lonesome tumbleweed pinned against a rusted fence, blown and battered, miles from home.”
Plans for a Project
Bo Huston
“What follows are transcripts of interviews made sometime in the summer and autumn of 1983. I was so much younger then. I was sad, lonely, optimistic, radical (but a little too cautious to be radical). I took all the drugs that came my way, fucked with all the men who came my way … laughed a lot, but that was becoming a struggle.”
It Being Fall
Matthew Roberson
“Out and out again into the car. He’s not driving. Not. He turns for the seat belt and reaches and then lets the woman lean over and take hold and pull it to close with a click. She’s driving, the woman.”
The Waiting Dreamer
Blue Neustifter
“There were only two constants to the dreams: her and him. No matter where she was, no matter how lush or barren the landscape, he was there.”
Reflections in a Window
Cástulo Aceves
Translated by Michael Langdon
“Two men appear at the door of the airport. The first of them is the client; the second, much older, an investigator. They feel the cold air of the country they are visiting, on a continent where they are foreigners.”
Excerpt from Fieldwork
Vilde Fastvold
Translated by Wendy H. Gabrielsen
“In the institute corridors, people whisper that having sex in the field is something everyone does, but no one talks about. I haven’t asked anyone if it’s true because I’d rather console myself with the thought that fieldwork is messy and can’t be pinned down by ethical absolutes.”
Agónico Marcial 1960 – 1994
Israel Bonilla
“Agónico’s childhood belongs to myth, and it is now irretrievable. We know with confidence that he was born in Visalia. All other information has been gleaned from his letters to Segura.”