Instead of sleeping Kierk is out grabbing beers at a bar, sitting at the open window in the breeze and watching the late-night groups of people walk past in fits of laughter or discussion. Then he’s out to join them, meandering past the bright lamplights and shuttered store windows of New York City at night. To be a scientist again, to be working on consciousness again—he can’t believe it. He is a secular priest once more.
An excerpt from The Revelations, the first novel by Erik Hoel.
We were at the beach, I had been begging to go, to come along, and it was after a long lunch—your grandma wanted to talk to me about the Liberation—that we went for a walk along the coast.
Short fiction from Jacqueline Feldman.
Put your Rizla papers, dope stash, tobacco and lighter in the large kimono square pocket. Sling your camera bag over your right shoulder, the raft over both shoulders. Pick up the holdall. Push your feet into a pair of hotel slippers, which sit in front of the bedroom door. Swig back the last dregs of coffee. Put on the mirror shades tucked into the blue chain covering the front door. Struggle to exit as the chain gets wrapped around your neck.
Short fiction from Andrea Mason.
He lowers his bottom jaw until he feels tension in his eardrums. He’s a Burmese python, a rewilded descendant of an exotic pet discarded in the swamplands. Opens wide and inserts the first of his Jersey corn-cobs longways in. Clamps his teeth down when the gag reflex says present, pulls the cob back and scrapes the kernels offworld into his mouth. Golden popping rows.
A short story by Tom Laplaige.
Given the unique elements to The Moon Down to Earth, I opted out of a traditional review. Instead, I gave another voice to its conversations through the format below — assembling a cut-up into Jace’s bicycle wheel/the pizzas he delivers, the spokes/slices representing the book’s eight vital characters.
Gabriel Hart reviews James Nulick‘s The Moon Down to Earth.
In September of 2003, during Scott’s first year of grad school, two years after he’d set that dumpster on fire, a young undergrad named Millie Dufresne set off a series of pipe bombs on campus, shutting down the school for eight days. Scott had seen Millie almost every morning, as she worked at the coffee shop right off campus. She was a friendly girl who’d always smiled when she asked how his day was going, which had always seemed like a stupid question, as it was 7:30am and the day hadn’t even been given a chance to fully develop. But she’d always smiled and said Awesome! every time he told her his day was going okay.
Read an extract from Jeff Chon‘s forthcoming novel, Hashtag Good Guy with a Gun.
The X-ray shows an opaque stain on a lobe of the right lung. Fernand has no precise idea of what this means, beyond the fact that the statement’s length invites the interpretation that what he took for a common cold, caught after a soccer match in Algeria, may be a more serious illness. Very probably tuberculosis.
An excerpt from Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us, the first novel from Joseph Andras.
On Wednesday, December 4, 1935, beneath an article about the removal of a controversial monument from the front lawn of the county courthouse, the twenty-first page of the Los Angeles Times carried an item about the death of an assistant professor, thirty-two years of age [sic], a graduate of the Universities of California and Paris, then employed in the Classics Department at Harvard, in a hotel suite overlooking downtown’s MacArthur Park, where he and his wife, Marian (née Tanhauser), were staying during a visit to her gravely ill mother, whose estate they were putting in order.
Short fiction from Ryan Ruby.
The bachelor enters to a bar on the back alley. He notices that the tune in the Chinese restaurant is chasing him. The happy rhythm of ‘La en gañadora’ is coiling around him in the dim light. ‘La engañadora’ means the fraudster in Spanish. But it was translated in the US as “Anything Can Happen When You’re in Havana”.
A short story by Hiromi Suzuki.
During these lulls he would approach the walls warily and place his ear against them, listening to the slumbering monster on the other side — its fresh breath of eternal rehashing — as though he were back in the catacombs. Sometimes he placed his sweaty hands flush with the wall on either side of his head and they would leave marks resembling prehistoric cave paintings.
A film by Julie Kamon based on a text by Andrew Gallix.
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