Photo: Ray Hennessy / Unsplash
In May 1974, in New York’s René Block Gallery at 409 West Broadway, Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) carried out his performance “I Like America and America L…
Fiction
Photo: Zoltan Tasi / Unsplash A mother’s conflict with her daughter causes her to reflect on Khawnaa, a mathematician-astrologer and light of the Bengali medieval court. When my da…
Photo: Philipp Bock/Flickr Banned from entering soccer stadiums since Iran’s 1979 revolution, the young women in this story hatch a risky plan to get inside the stadium on game day. …
Photo: Jordan Whitt/Unsplash In this coming-of-age tale with a dark twist, two brothers engage in a deathly game. MY BROTHER LEMMY taught me how to die. I was then…
Photo: Annie Pratt/Unsplash While on a pilgrimage to the site of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia, which sparked the Arab Spring, the narrator meditates on revolution, death,…
Un Uovo Vuoto, illustration by Damiano Cenderelli Italian sci-fi master Clelia Farris conjures a solitary egglike being and the company eager to provide a piercing solution.…
Photo: Bishnu Sarangi A girl is forced to reexamine the myths surrounding her aunt when her aunt moves in with the family in Texas after leaving her husband in India. Is she more goddess, more…
Photo: NettPix/Pixabay In this story from Asja Bakić’s debut collection, Mars, two women exist in a dangerous symbiosis. Lichen: nature’s chaos. A body of algae and mushroom, th…
Photo: Wine Dharma/UNsplash In his bildungsroman, the “People’s Poet of Azerbaijan” describes a time when “all the world smelled of bread.” I’d taken off my clothes and climbed into bed.…
“Gravity” by Dani Montesinos Feet to Feet My wife and I have a way of sleeping that might seem a bit bizarre: neither face-to-face nor back-to-back, but with the soles of our feet pressed…
llustration by Shanti Sparrow A nine-year-old wonders whether her story of a publicly shamed elephant is responsible for her immigrant mother’s mysterious condition. O nce upon a r…
Photo: James Stringer/FlickrA chance encounter with a magnetic stranger shifts something inside the narrator of this story set in the streets of Tórshavn.I first met her around…
Photo: Steve Oprey/PixabayIn this story from Milena Solot’s manuscript A Possible Place, the recently named matron of a successful whorehouse in Mexico City walks into the car wi…
A small birch tree with arctic thyme, lupine, sea thrift, angelica, marsh marigolds, welsh poppies, oriental poppies, rhubarb and red currant. Watercolor by Roshni RobertA woman’s compli…
Photo: Chris Devers/FlickrA bar mitzvah brings multiple generations of a family together in celebration, far from the reach of the evil eye.NEW ROCHELLE,…
Photo: Sarah McGee/FlickrWhile visiting a kibbutz to give a lecture, and after dining on both hot desert-root vegetable soup and sushi, the speaker becomes the listener when someone in th…
photo: arcaion/pixabayAfter work, my friend and I go to the Café de Prague in the heart of the Hamra district. As we sit at a table by the large window, looking out on the lighted street, I think abou…
After deciding to end it all, a woman takes a final subway ride. Z, the story writer, decided to end her diary. What is more, with an eye on approaching Christmas, she would adorn it with sta…
Through story and stranger, two fallen-out friends mediate their way back to one another in the Edinburgh Zoo.Meet me in the waves, you bad fisherman, and I will give you Death by Water.Those…
And somewhere in all these, all these possible variants of the bus-taking crowd, was Karl, who would appear from out of nowhere, and I would be the only one who could see him.I…
An apartment on the bank of the Nile River for a fair price sounds like a no-brainer, unless that apartment happens to be right next to one of the most infamous prisons in Egypt.The…
Photo: Katherine Dewey HillThis story begins with three @ handles and ends with two.With a single hashtag, repeated insistently like a mantra: #m…
Photo: Daniel KriegIn post-unification Berlin, groups of squatters compete for empty housing. Who will gain the upper hand?The next morning, a group of angry men were standing in the…
Illustration: flickr.com / xyzquantumpoetA Lutheran seminary student wonders what it takes to become a Jew for his girlfriend, whose embrace is “not a preface to anything else.”I…
Photo: Kai C. SchwarzerA relationship is put to the test when a young couple visits a family member on an isolated island.We left home to think it over. Nanna had an abortion three years ago,…