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Photos by Nick Zinner, Patterson Beckwith, Jonnie Craig, Patrick Tsai, Rosalie Knox and Stacey Mark

Improv comedy is the bravest, most immediate form of making up stories that there is. It's not always the funniest, or the smartest, or the best, but it's always the bravest.

This story was written in 1982. It is an early version of a story called "Family," that was written for my first collection, titled Bad Behavior, but got cut; it is also an early version of a story called "Orchid" that was published in my second...

During the war, a colonel received a letter from his wife. She missed him very much, it said, and would he please come visit because she's worried she will die without having seen him. The colonel immediately applied for leave, and as it happened that...

Poppy Z. Brite’s early novels are full of vampires, angsty teenagers, and other beautiful, tortured creatures, often sexually ambiguous and with varying shades of flaxen, crimson, or raven hair, tangled and blowing in the hot wind. Her first two novels...

I tend to flip from OK insomnia to bad insomnia depending on how things in my life are going, and this story came out of a stretch of insomnia as bad as I've had in a while. I'd been struggling with another story for some months by that point, and woke...

The "Songs of the Eastern Slavs" cycle was supposed to be a literary hoax. In the early 19th century, Mérimée put out an entire book called Songs of the Western Slavs, which the whole world (including Pushkin, who translated it) took to be a...

"Growing Chinese Greens" grew out of an actual experience: I discovered a note with those words written on my calendar, but I couldn't remember what they meant or how they came to be there. I simply wanted to describe the way the uncanny can slip into...

These drawings grew from a set of pictures that I did a few years ago of children talking to strange creatures on beaches. They were a bit like illustrations to unwritten stories by E. Nesbit. Then when I revisited them more recently I discovered that...

While growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, my father converted to an American brand of Christianity that has its roots somewhere in rural Pennsylvania. A fallout of his new faith was that-unlike in other homes in Nigeria where allegiance was to the former...