Congratulations to Elizabeth McCracken, whose story collection Thunderstruck has been longlisted for the National Book Award. Included in Thunderstruck is “Peter Elroy: A Documentary by Ian Casey,” which appeared in our Spring 2014 issue.
Through the window Clara could see the men: dark still hats huddled together. The only thing moving was their pipe smoke. It curled in lamp-lit clouds. Then—a whoop!—the clouds blew, the huddle burst, the hats were flying.
Leon was a loser, but a tough loser trapped in a linebacker’s body. He wasn’t a vindictive person, or a hateful person, but there were long gaps in his disposition where you could tell a certain kind of dimness was setting in, the kind of...
She sounded good over the telephone. A soft rich alto voice, full grown. She was now twenty-two. Benton was fifty-one. A half-sister he had never had a conversation with in his life. Kate. Katie.
We got one channel that came over the mountains from West Virginia, and bad weather just about ruined that. On stormy winter nights Papaw went outside to turn the antenna while my big brother, Wendell, stayed in front of the TV, watching...
My new boss, Chick, was a morbidly obese manic off his meds who hailed from a tiny town I’d never heard of—Wassily, Louisiana—a town so small, Chick claimed, the shotgun shacks only had space for pistols. In summers, he told me, you...
About a year ago, Sergey had stopped looking for a job. He now spent his time scouting the internet, hoping to come up with an app idea that would make him successful. It was the banal apps that sold. If only Sergey could think of something...
