The Escalating Costs of Being Single in America
Why is life in this country so hostile to single people?
Life
Twenty Years Gone
Grief, conspiracy theories, and one family’s search for meaning in the two decades since 9/11.
What Is Lifestyle?
An investigation.
Michaela the Destroyer
How a young talent from East London went from open-mic nights to making the most sublimely unsettling show of the year.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "There Is No Baby In This Story"
An antique high chair; the complexities of parenting and growing.
Tabula Rasa
On the old-man project.
Fiction Pick of the Week: Gold Lamé, Crinoline and the Meaning of Life
A life in objects, facts, and yearning.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Just-in-Case Stones"
An obsession with stones propels a woman from childhood to adulthood.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Step In"
A mysterious stone and the complexities of grief.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Corpseless Shrouds"
A woman recalls an endless lifetime of near-death experiences.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Stay A While"
An elderly woman renovates her basement for renters and discovers uncomfortable truths about herself.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Enzo Ponza"
A girl kidnaps a mysterious figure.
"What has he spared me, this Enzo Ponza? What, with his constant presence, has he prevented happening in my life, and what, if anything, has he caused to happen? Does he care for me, my mother, my children? Is he escaping something, or is he just biding his time? Why has he never once asked to leave? And why did I never investigate whether he had any living relatives to whom I could send a ransom note?"
Fiction Pick of the Week: "A Friendly Game"
A story of growth, regression, and divergent paths.
"But mostly, Joan sat for hours in her favorite spot of their old living room couch where she breastfed Phil. It felt sometimes like he was resting in the crook of her arm. And other times, her breasts would drip milk and she’d sit with a throbbing ache in her chest. Her husband returned twice a week, a different person each time as if trying on new identities: laughing, angry, sedate, stoic. Sometimes he brought the rocks with him. Sometimes Joan would have to go out on her own looking for them."
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Of Two Minds"
A story of the very complicated demographics of small-town life.
"But I’m no country bumpkin, let me tell you. Cultural institutions in Spencer include a glass studio, a community theater, and a bona fide art school, which relocated in 2008 from the city of Detroit, which as you might have guessed, did not make the cut for Relocate-America.com’s Top 100 Places to Live for 2007. Hence, the art school moving to Spencer. If you’re wondering how a city gets on the list, it says on Relocate-America.com’s website that theirs is the “only list that is determined by statistics and feedback of the people who live, work & play in these communities.” So basically, they take in consideration both fact and opinion and process them in a secret formula to produce a totally non-biased ranking based not just on numbers but also on the enthusiasm of Real People Who Definitely Live There. This explains why we are only three slots down from San Francisco, California on the rankings, because we are definitely on par with a major metropolitan, ocean-bordering melting pot with a majority-minority population of close to a million people where it Doesn’t Snow Ever; anyone who’s ever been to Spencer, Iowa can attest to that."
Fiction Pick of the Week: "The Speed of Stopping"
On fishing, physics, and life's intangibles.
<p>“Back when his girls were girls, with fluffy pink rugs on their bathroom floor, Burgundy wasn’t much of a second-guesser. He was a richly confident physicist with work at the university. He golfed. They went to the club. Even when there were questions of the girls smoking or skipping school (and there were always questions, wink-wink), Burgundy hadn’t worried about His Girls. They weren’t that kind of a family. And anyway (so lovely were His Girls) if they would have been that kind of family they would have worn it well. Being well-paid, occupied and cohesively married does wonders for a man’s confidence.”</p>
I'm Writing a Story
On the intersection of writing and daily life.
"There are the four AM’s where you let friends take you out against your better judgment and you find yourself grinding against the bodies of people you don’t know, and something you took is traveling like liquid fire through your veins, through the bird’s nest of neurons in your brain. There’s the four AM where you just met this girl and don’t want to stop talking, where even after you hang up you can’t get to sleep, everything is alive and awake, the universe is calling, the radio is playing the perfect song, you get your jacket and walk the streets and every other night walker knows you, knows that everything is connected to the novel you’re writing, and all of these people, all the cops, homeless people, partiers, drunks, loners, lovers, all of them are offering themselves to you, willing you to tell their story. There is joy in these late hours."
