by Martin Philip | Mar 20, 2020
Hiding in forested darkness armed with a .30-06 rifle is new to me. As I sit, gun on my lap, snuggled in the roots of a white pine, stars overhead fade into daylight. Chickadees mark the change with buzzing arcs. I wait. I listen. I look. Nothing happens. I think, so,...
by Maria Terrone | Jan 23, 2020
*Notable Essay Best American Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2018 The dolls never slept. They stayed wide eyed and unblinking on their shelf in my small, overheated room, watching me watch the man and woman in the apartment across the way. As a...
by Joseph Heathcott | Jan 8, 2020
I sat on the basement floor of the courthouse reading through old death records. Outside the afternoon sun blasted the streets and sidewalks of the small Kentucky town. But down there it was cool and humid. Whitewashed stone walls glistened and streaked with dirty...
by Thomas Rice | Dec 16, 2019
Another surly October morning on Rathdangan Farm, the name of our rocky little homestead in the foothills of the Sugarloaf Range, and Mother Nature was in a nasty mood. Her swirling wind bossed the sycamore leaves around the farmyard, and wisps of her clammy...
by Gary Soto | Dec 12, 2019
My wife and I are into season 3 of Victoria, the Masterpiece Theatre series that seems as long as the queen’s monarchial reign. It’s a slow-moving narrative in which a tea cup is picked up, put down. Then, for dramatic tension, the camera pans to a terrier...
by Traci Brimhall | Dec 2, 2019
One of my wrists is tattooed with a fat iamb, which my son calls a moon and a tear and wants to know what makes the waxing moon have such sadness, so I tell him it’s a heartbeat and put his tiny fingers to the pulse flutter there, and he wonders why I have a heart in...
