Story
GUN NEEDLE SPOON – I’m Starving
Patrick O'Neil
San Francisco, July 21, 1996
In the refrigerator are five cakes: carrot, lemon, raspberry swirl, three-layer chocolate, and some kind of tiramisu, or maybe it’s mocha. I can’t tell. Five large, heavily frosted cakes, ...
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Story
A Bad Day – An Excerpt From Duke And Jill
Ron Kolm
Duke knew it was going to be a bad day, even before he got out of bed. He had a splitting headache, and a lump the size of a nickel bag on the back of his neck. He couldn’t remember where he’d been last night—or how he...
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Essay
Meet the Beats: Herbert Huncke
Hilary Halladay
When opportunity literally knocked not long after his return from sea, Herbert was ready for a new diversion. It was 1944, the war would soon end, and change was inevitable, even for an unemployed drug addict for whom change...
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Art
Best of 2015 – Sensitive Skin More Better Favorites
The Editors
This was so much fun last year, I thought we'd do it again. (Two of my favorite books of the year were ones I picked up from last year's list: Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, recommended by Deborah Pintonelli, and ...
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Story
Narcisa – An Excerpt
Jonathan Shaw
I was seeing double with fatigue. But Narcisa was just getting started.
She hopped along, from subject to subject, like a cocaine-crazed, hyperactive little fairy, flittering between realms of thought I could barely fatho...
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Poem
Holiday
D. James Smith
My Rose of Sharon has gone dormant,
Thin and spindly as
The many masts of sailing ships
Gone to port in winter
That I’ve seen in paintings,
So I’ll be a long time waiting
In the black flowers of my days
For summ...
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Poem
Marine 1–10
Max Blagg
A collaboration between Max Blagg and Alex Katz for the Marine Series’ Exhibition Catalogue, Jablonka Gallery, Berlin, 2008. This piece is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Slow Dazzle: Poems & Prose For 23 Artists, pu...
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Story
The 9 Lives of Ray the Cat Jones
Stewart Home
I’m a face. My breakout from Pentonville in 1958 has been praised as one of the greatest prison escapes of all time by the likes of south London gangster Mad Frankie Fraser. The details differ somewhat in the various accou...
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Poem
Beaches in Cornwall, Apples in Devon, A Foot in London
Christopher Romero
draped Kelp and no lullaby thick sound from deep wonder ritual unconformed
to sea sutra canters
the silver egg’s path from studio
to rocks
near shore
to ocean soaked tidal pools lady lay day
heat mapped exposure turn...
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Story
Santa Barbara–1980 / San Francisco–1982
Matt McLaren
Santa Barbara–1980
I didn’t have a mattress yet. it had been three months, but I still lay in my room on my dirty clothes, arranged under a fitted sheet. Ron stood in my doorway, leaning against the jamb. He stared at...
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Art
Love and Strangulation
Carl Watson
The philosophers of the old romances say, and many specialists today concur, that desire is nothing more than the result of a necessary and continuous projection of the self into others; an unattainable wholeness is represen...
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Poem
The Calf
D. James Smith
Child of a dying wind it lay
In the muck and hot, blond grass
Below the dam and its strangled creek
That my boyhood friend and I
Crossed that morning, determined
To flee the nun’s black habits and ink,
To claim ...
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Story
Welcome to All the Pleasures
Robert C. Hardin
My father liked to say that I’d always been impossible to find. During birth, he recalled, I couldn’t be extracted with forceps. No one could see me, so I made my own way out of my mother. The midwife only located me aft...
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Story
Code of Violence
Thaddeus Rutkowski
On the subway, I see a boy who is about 10 years old; he’s with his father. Both of them have red hair, but the boy has Asian features—a round face and pointy eyes. His father has a long face and Western eyes. Maybe this...
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Story
The Storm
Peter Blauner
He liked to have his house in order, which was why he’d never had a family or pets. He liked his routines and there was nothing wrong with that. Every day in the summer months, he wore his father’s old Fire Department wi...
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