Volume 14 Issue 12
Asssscat's Temporary, One-night Only, Funny Stories
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.
Vice Fashion - The Second Annual Fiction Issue
Photos by Nick Zinner, Patterson Beckwith, Jonnie Craig, Patrick Tsai, Rosalie Knox and Stacey Mark
Assassin
Some years ago I floated down a stretch of the Colorado River to Lake Powell on a rubber raft alongside other rafts packed with vacationing college girls, airline stewardesses, a grocer from San Jose, and I do not remember who else. It took about ten...
In Cretaceous Seas
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...
Cary Grant On Lsd
Cary Grant had the persona of a happy-go-lucky guy, but as a human being he must've had conflicts. He said as much when he started taking LSD. This was in the late 1950s, when his acting career had already peaked, his marriages hadn't worked out, and
Medicine
This is a story that started off as a confessional letter. I lived in China during my early 20s and until now haven't wanted to write anything about it. "Medicine" appears here as an excerpt from a novel-in-progress about those years.
Gary Fisketjon Edits Your Heroes
Gary Fisketjon is an editor at large and vice president of Knopf. Among the writers he has edited are Raymond Carver, Bret Easton Ellis, Patricia Highsmith, Cormac McCarthy, Jay McInerney, and Tobias Wolff.
Scratch - Excerpt From A Novel In Progress
I have been working on this novel for more than ten years. During those years, I have written and published other books, but this one remains unfinished. I have come to realize that this is because it is a work that comes forth from me only when...
A Mother's Farewell
A young man named Oleg was left an orphan when his mother died. All he had left was his older sister, for though his father was still alive, he turned out not to be Oleg's real father. Oleg's real father, as he learned when he started going through his...
Being A Monster
These stories are part of a novel I'm writing, and the novel is about how we create the idea of utopia, and then what happens to that idea. We start out with a kind of dissatisfaction, something isn't quite right with the world; it's unjust or unfair...