The Swine King by Michael Jeffrey Lee
“First,” he said, shouting, even though his advisors were quite close, “know that I have exhausted every means of keeping myself alive, and when I leave you at last, it will not be by choice. But even so, all animals must die, even great ones, and my time is swiftly approaching...” Read More
The Third by Claire Donato
There is no sequitur in the previous sentence, I realize. I got carried away by the sound of her head falling on the floor. Subsequently, I picked up the shards and rearranged them into a distorted portrait, through which I perceive a foreboding sense of self... Read More
Three Texts by Gabriel Blackwell
Fenollosa, whose invention was simultaneously Pound’s most intriguing and least faithful translation, writes that “no full sentence really completes a thought [because] motion leaks everywhere... Read More
Record of a Tryst In Tokyo by Eisuke Yoshiyuki, translated from Japanese by Marissa Skeels
The jazz grew fiercer in the colored spotlight’s rays, as if sobbing or adrift on rough beats, spitting tapes of lust as white as seed... Read More
Dear Prudence by Marream Krollos
Once somebody said that these girls we teach are only going to go on to eat homemade pies all day waiting until their fat husbands come home to fuck them. Only a dream for the rest of us girls in the world… our bodies having already split apart with ways men make war... Read More
The Washing and the Clothes Line by Serge Pey, translated from French by Donald Nicholson-Smith
I learned my letters as I ate my alphabet soup. Tiny letters, without much meaning. For her part, my mother read the earth, because marks on the ground were the writing of the night. From those signs, outside the house, she knew that a fox had passed by along the road... Read More
The Lydian by Théodore de Banville, translated from French by Patricia Worth
Not long ago and not far away, a sculptor in love with his statue, as in the days of Pygmalion the King of Cyprus, reproduced the same miracle and brought her to life, transforming the marble into living flesh through which glorious blood flowed by his will and the force of his overpowering desire... Read More
The Free Brutalists by Rav Grewal-Kök
Waverly read the drafts of Borg-Olivier’s chapters as soon as he finished them. Often she wept. One late-winter night in Borg-Olivier’s apartment, as snow fell gently outside onto the silent street, she told him it was as if he were writing the novel for her alone... Read More
Cognoscenti In a Room Hung with Pictures by Benjamin K. Rice
The cruelty of an image is that it excites us toward an anticipation that it can’t fulfill. It gives by taking away. Though, when Cotán gives me an image of fruit, he does not take away from me any particular instance of pear or pomegranate—instead, he takes away the whole idea of fruit... Read More
Porn by Fortunato Salazar
But now, in retrospect, ten looked like an infant garment. By noon, at this rate, I would close the last page on the book. I slowed myself down. The afternoon loomed with its frantic taxidermy errands... Read More