Why We Like It: “Operation Rhododendron” by Samyak Shertok
In the opening lines of Samyak Shertok’s “Operation Rhododendron,” everyday objects transform into makeshift weapons for role-playing scenes of war.
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Pushcart and Best Microfiction Nominations
Check out our nominations for the Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best Microfiction!
What We’re Reading: Spider Love Song and Other Stories by Nancy Au
Spider Love Song and Other Stories by Nancy Au is a short-story collection about stories—how narratives can be used to construct and deconstruct lived realities.
microreview & interview: Taneum Bambrick’s Vantage
I was first drawn to Taneum Bambrick’s full-length debut Vantage (Copper Canyon, 2019) because it had “an ecological eye,” but after reading the collection, I realize how much of a disservice it is to characterize this book solely as environmentally urgent.
excerpt from “Duluth” by Ira Sukrungruang
My family feared white people. White people, after all, danced on our newly paved driveway, leaving gym-shoe footprints. White people threw rocks and rotten eggs at our windows. White people stole my family’s first big purchase, a ’72 Thunderbird that was found two months later—stripped—in a steakhouse parking lot off Cicero Avenue. White people were …
Blackifying Stories
I noted that I’d been writing the stories I wanted, kind of, but I’d also been including other people’s ideas of blackness. I started writing stories that contradicted some folks’s view of blackness but felt true to my actual world and my created ones.
On Reading
We’d like to recognize our editorial assistants, the volunteer readers who contribute their time and cognitive energies to our literary endeavor, without payment. We’d also like to share some of the kinds of comments that happen throughout the reading process
Why We Like It: “Next to Us: Sonnets, Divided” by Lis Sanchez
In “Next to Us: Sonnets Divided,” Sanchez skillfully considers what it means to be both simultaneously inside and outside acts of violence.
Debunking miCRo Myths
I came across many well-meaning flash fiction “Do and Don’t” lists all of which managed, without fail, to piss me off.
“Cubby Safe” by Julianna Baggott
Frequent CR contributor Julianna Baggott has constructed a dark and all-too-believable morality tale about gun violence in schools. The light tone of the young narrator belies the eerie circumstances the schoolchildren experience in the name of safety.