“Model Home”
What an odd thing a family was,…The permutations, like the patterns of a chess game, seemed endless.
The Ziller family – Warren and Camille and their three children: Dustin, Delilah (“Lyle”), and Justin, and Mr. Leonard, an old and arthritic dog – left their hometown of Nashotah, Wisconsin in 1982 to move to a suburban development outside of Los Angeles, California. In pursuit of success and wealth, Warren Ziller invests everything in a real estate development – Auburn Fields – that ends up being adjacent to a dump. Three years later (1985) Warren has lost everything but is afraid to tell his family who all seem to be completely unaware of what is going on around them. Read more 
“My Gentle Barn”
At the core of every human being is a resilience that buoys us back to the surface of life. With every painful loss or setback that brings us crashing to our knees, we find some way to keep breathing and move forward.
My Gentle Barn is the story of how one young girl made her dream come true. Ellie Laks grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family whose members didn’t understand who she was or what made her tick. Told to be quiet, help her mother, and subjugate herself to adults and males in particular, Ellie was a lonely and angry child who didn’t know why her family put her in a box where she didn’t belong and blamed her when she was victimized. Turning to animals – and especially those who needed help – Ellie found solace, compassion, and understanding in the creatures she shared a special connection with. Looking back as an adult, Ellie writes:
“Friendly Fire”
..honey, this is life. You learn to live with guilt. You do the best you can. Believe me, you don’t get away with anything in this life. You’re going to pay the price, so you make sure you get your money’s worth.
Friendly Fire, a collection of 11 short stories written by Kathryn Chetkovich was awarded the John Simmons Short Fiction Award from the University of Iowa. Although 16 years have passed since the book was published, this treasury of short stories is as relevant today as when they were first read in 1998. Forthright but with a subtle message and often open-ended, these stories don’t have twists or imply completion primarily because the stories deal with tough issues: envy, irony, dishonesty, loyalty, teenage angst, aging, friendship, marriage, love, lust, and responsibility – highly charged emotions that inspire loose ends and don’t take well to predictability. Read more
“The Interestings”
From this day forward, because we are clearly the most interesting people who ever lived, because we are just so fucking compelling, our brains swollen with intellectual thoughts, let us be known as The Interestings. And let everyone who meets us fall down dead in our path from just how fucking interesting we are. Read more
“Safe As Houses”
Safe As Houses is a collection of short stories written by Marie-Helene Bertino and winner of The Iowa Short Fiction Award (2012). The title of the book – Safe As Houses – signifies what most of us believe a home should be: a haven from the outside world where families celebrate holidays and display refrigerator art and framed photographs, but Bertino shows the reader that home can also be a house that is wiped away in an instant, a place we flee from, or a prison in which we lock the world out. Despite the general belief that people are safe in their homes, the truth can be entirely different because what makes a house a home is its inhabitants, not the brick and mortar – and people can be dangerous. Read more
“The Woman Upstairs”
I’ve finally come to understand that life itself is the Fun House. All you want is that door marked EXIT, the escape to a place where Real Life will be; and you can never find it. No: let me correct that. In recent years, there was a door, there were doors, and I took them and I believed in them, and I believed for a stretch that I’d managed to get out into Reality – and God, the bliss and terror of that, the intensity of that: it felt so different – until I suddenly realized I’d been stuck in the Fun House all along. I’d been tricked. The door marked EXIT hadn’t been an exit at all. Read more
“Memory Wall”
Seven decades of stories, five decades of marriage, four decades of working…..spatulas and salad forks, novels and recipes, nightmares and daydreams, hellos and goodbyes. Could it all really be wiped away?
Where do our memories go once we’ve lost our ability to summon them? Read more
“Leaving The Atocha Station”
No writer is free to renounce his political moment but literature reflects politics more than it affects it, an important distinction.
Ben Lerner was 24 years old when he traveled to Madrid, Spain on a Fulbright Scholarship in 2003. A recent graduate of Brown University with a B.A. in Political Theory and an M.F.A. in Poetry, Lerner may have chosen Spain because of its troubled past – many poets writers, and artists were murdered, jailed, or forced into exile during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) – or because the country offers a unique perspective on politics, fascism, and terror – all of which make Spain a rich playground for those in the arts. Read more
“How To Be Alone”
I wonder if our current cultural susceptibility to the charms of materialism – our increasing willingness to see psychology as chemical, identity as genetic, and behavior as the product of bygone exigencies of human evolution – isn’t intimately related to the postmodern resurgence of the oral and the eclipse of the written: our incessant telephoning, our ephemeral e-mailing, our steadfast devotion to the flickering tube. Read more
“You Are Not A Stranger Here”
You and all the inheritors of wealth who think life is a matter of perfected sentiment. You are wrong.
Adam Haslett’s first published book, You Are Not A Stranger Here was a both a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002 and the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. – a notable achievement that few writers attain. A collection of nine short stories, You Are Not A Stranger Here was written by a master storyteller who skillfully weaves psychosis, devotion, death, clairvoyance, neglect, suicide, abandonment, and homosexuality into the lives of his characters. Cleverly written, many of the stories contain a train wreck the reader rarely sees coming which is the beauty of Haslett’s writing – the element of surprise. Read more
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