Sara Lippmann’s Read it Loud: “Frog and Toad Are Friends” by Arnold Lobel

This is the latest in Sara Lippmann’s Read it Loud: Notes From Storytime. To go to the column page, please click here. Warning: Things are about to get earnest. But it’s been a brutal winter and now with the first green shoots muscling their way through the cracked earth I feel compelled to return to […]

“Winter in Al Shuwaikh” by Aubrey Hirsch

The power went out on New Year’s Eve. Without the sounds of the radio and the dishwasher, I could hear tanks spitting sand in the desert. I didn’t know whether or not I should be afraid. I looked to my father. He placed a hand on my head. “Let’s play cards, yes?” When it was […]

Talking with Furniture: Dani Shapiro

Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Devotion and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, and has been widely anthologized. She has taught in […]

Review: Tenderoni

The Reviewed: Tenderoni (forthcoming), a collection of flash fiction by Kathy Fish The Reviewer: Sam Rasnake *** One of the gifts of narrative is in creating worlds for readers to enter and spend time in. Good books of short fiction and flash offer readers many points of discovery and connection. Kathy Fish, a writer whose […]

Two Poems by Steve Mitchell

flash fiction There is an instant when the finish might be different, when a path flickers and vanishes like a light in a distant window so quick and so far we have to wonder if we saw it. There is a moment— one of us always notices— when we wouldn’t have ended angry. The blue-white […]