#62: Nonfiction by Ruth Neuwald Falcon
ARTIFACTS When I was growing up, I hated the crowded shelves in the living room, den, and hallway of our Upper West Side apartment. “I arrived from Europe with nothing,” Ellen said when I complained. “I have built a life and filled it with beautiful things.” “But you can’t see them,” I protested. “They’re just […]
#60: Nonfiction by Christopher Eckman
THE ART OF FUGUE They meet in Burlington, Iowa. My rail-thin mother with curly hair and her little girl beside her, my tall bony father with his bachelor aviator glasses and slick black hair. Their love is at first, like many others, obsessive. They spend drunken nights together and laugh about them the next morning. They are young, […]
#54: Nonfiction by Scott Laudati
WELCOME TO PARADISE In my junior year of high school, I saw thirty-five fist fights. The violence arrived one day like a mass psychogenic illness no one had ever seen, and no one knew what to do. One fight the first day. Five the next. Just before Christmas break, we had two assemblies. In the […]
#51: Nonfiction by Michael Silverman
NEWARK As I waited for the garbage to be emptied into a truck, I was with a group of young men waiting to be taken through the same entrance to learn our fate. Would we be serving in the armed forces of the United States? Why was a 23-year-old graduate student standing on this filthy […]
#50: Nonfiction by Aakriti Karun
TOUCHING I once heard that the oldest parts of the brain associate themselves with ritual. On default, the primitive brain relapses, in some beastly instinct, the animal overwhelming the human with something as mundane as routine. You, the host, are responsible for crafting the ritual, but you cannot be blamed for giving in. Can you? […]
#44: Nonfiction by Will Brooks
KING OF DIRT Just the appearance of the truck made me feel dirty. The grubby yellow paint gave little hint to the fact that the truck had started out white. I walked around the truck, being careful to stay upwind. On the driver’s side door was a trail of what looked like dried dirty water, […]
#32: Nonfiction by Alicia DeFonzo
THE TURK The funny thing about war is, even though you’re in it, half the time you don’t know where you are. It’s a foreign land with strange names. Anyone involved in intelligence or strategy knew, but the GI had no idea. You don’t try to remember where you are during the war. You have […]
#26: Nonfiction by Leonard Henry Scott
THE CADAVER ROOM “Let’s go to the Cadaver Room.” This happened a long time ago. The three of us had all started college together. Now, I was in my fifth year of a four year undergraduate program. Jack had dropped out at the beginning of the previous year and worked for the Post Office, the greatest repository […]
#23: Nonfiction by Kristina Tate
THE ABANDONED (EXCERPTED FROM WAY HOME, A MEMOIR) I’d been asleep for hours, curled around my sister’s yellow blanket when a muffled call pushed its way into my brain. “Siobhan? Siobhan?” My father’s words came to me as though I were underwater. “Where’s your sis—” I rolled over. “Krissy?” My father’s face loomed over me, confused. […]
#19: Non-Fiction by Renee Nicholson
BEYOND THE CLIQUE: I KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENING 1987: The year I started choosing music for myself, not just passively listening to the radio or my parents’ music. An early choice: R.E.M., who, at this point, distinguished themselves as college radio darlings. When I decided that I, too, liked their sound—mumbly lyrics that, to my teenaged […]