The Second Annual Fiction Issue
Incident At Sokolniki
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...
Women Holding Strange Creatures
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...
College Town
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...
Night Shift
Before the low-cost German supermarkets Aldi and Lidl came over in the late 1990s, the UK had its own homegrown "subprime" supermarket chain, Kwik Save. It grew up in North Wales near where I grew up and it pioneered the margin-boosting tactics of...
Voice Of America
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...
Orgy
There's a famous line from the movie The Wild Ones. Marlon Brando, playing the part of a motorcycle rebel, has rolled into town, and when a townsperson asks him, "What are you protesting against," he says, "Wha'd ya got?" Although Brando was...
vice Presents The People's Lists
HONORÉ DE BALZAC (1799-1850)Balzac, one of the supreme writers of realistic fiction, was, in his own life, a man of gross appetites and pretensions as well as of gargantuan genius and accomplishment
Trailer
Noir is a short novel starring you as Philip M. Noir, Private Investigator. It began as a story about a dockside detective in pursuit of something-like truth or beauty, the ineffable-and became over the course of its writing a kind of...