It was 911 calling me. If you can believe it. Them calling me.

He keeps going, going, going on; his people groan and fall one after the other, but he keeps on going, going and in the end, perishes himself, but still remains the despot and tsar of...

Are there not times, Ridley, when you yourself wish only to hear the best in people – and not to be dragged downwards into the underworld we all regularly inhabit?

I wait, you play. You speak, I cave. I promise, you break. You game me, daily, you play me.

A novel is just a story that hasn’t yet discovered a way to be brief.

The strikes continue ruthlessly. I brace for each blow, numbering it as the heat subsides, and enjoying her tender exploration of my swollen lips in between. The rhythm pulls me through the assault and, all...

I’m either on the cusp of greatness or the edge of insanity.

Christian-like”, Messianic? We should cherem (ban) them from every aspect of Jewish life. And we must strip them of every Jewish privilege!

At one point, I began to think that I had a divine doorman. Lenny was the most unlikely incarnation of God I could imagine, and yet, I kept drifting irresistibly towards this absurd conclusion. Despite...

Yeah, well, maybe it’s time to let another man have it, you think?” he teased. ~ “The Mirror

His manhood sways briefly, then comes to a standstill.

Oh no, princess. I would never carry out anything which could harm your being. This was just something I was told to say. I’m not sure what is planned, if, you go against their wishes....

I gulped, mesmerized by his hypnotic eyes and charming, spearmint smile, and uttered something intelligent like,”Uh, huh.” ~ from Dragon Flight

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and...

For the biographer, the final clue to character lies in the yet unread – the scribbled note, the diary page, a notation in the margin of a draft – until the day when even the...

A prickle of awareness made the hairs at the back of his neck stand. A deep chill sank into his flesh to settle around his heart, squeezing it. Skeletal fingers scraped along his spine and...

These short stories are vast structures existing mostly in the subconscious of our cultural history. They will live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a...

Stop flirting,” he tells her, but he looks at her breasts and thinks, The girls with the bruises in the sex films are just dead dolls, but this pretty toy is alive.

Obelmäker is a deeply fearful person and terribly indecisive. Even when he makes a choice, it’s usually bad.

Apalah gunanya impian bila tidak diwujudkan?

Given our new situation, I think you should find a more appropriate way to address me Polly. Do so now please.”I don’t even have to think. An invisible shroud of submission seems to have fallen...

Apapun teorinya, hari sial itu memang ada. Bila mungkin, ingin rasanya menghapus hari tersebut atau memulai segala sesuatu dari awal. Bagaimana bila kita memulai hari dengan cara yang berbeda, memikirkan dan melakukan hal-hal yang berbeda...

I need to master the art of talking to her before I can even contemplate anything else.

It’s unexpectedly painful to have become a pronoun.

Smoke rose from the barrel of the gun like a serpent crawling up from its wicker basket

And don’t drop food.

Let’s press ahead a little further by sketching out a few variations among short shorts:ONE THRUST OF INCIDENT. (Examples: Paz, Mishima, Shalamov, Babel, W. C. Williams.) In these short shorts the time span is extremely...

Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President.

If a nuclear disaster occurred, and you had to live out those final painful days just stretched out somewhere thinking about your life–This is who I am. This is what I love. This is what...

The serious writer was aware of a paradox at the heart of his art: his inner world, the place of the strongest stories, was infinite, but it was also embedded in – if this was...

Sarucha (age 8): “Look, down there, I recognize it, ciudad de Jerusalén (the city of Jerusalem)! Jerusalén!, Jerusalén!” she exclaimed.

I had always been an atheist until I met Lenny. He was too wonderously complex and good for there to be no benevolent and intelligent force behind our marvelous cosmos. Lenny gave me the actual...

Absently, Quinn reached for the sheet to replace it over the aged mirror, but the back of his hand brushed against the cold surface and a strange shiver ran up his arm and down his...

Baumauer secretly fears Kalist – and Kalist knows it.

I’ve been asking you to marry me since we met! What more do you want?

I hate this night. I hate that it makes me a person so truly removed from the real me; this man who sits in silence in his parlor – purposely quarantined from his family –...

Do you want to risk it?

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a...

Short fiction seems more targeted – hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it’s a lot smokier...

Lending my voice to a dedicated readership is a match made in heaven.

He’s in a side room alone with her and it’s far too fucking hot.

An overnight bag with the company logo – a white silhouette of a finch (which once perched on the curved back of a stallion representing cofounder, Orwell, but has now been ‘adjusted’) – sits motionless...

It takes both sides to build a bridge.

Yes, sir.” I reply instantly. My voice sounds needy – already.

The farmhouse sat on a rise at the end of a long dirt road, in a clearing surrounded by fruit trees and ninety acres of pines. It was painted white, and peeling, and some former...

Ariana strikes me as the type of girl who is attracted to authenticity.

And next time? Eat the stupid cupcake.

Humans are aware of very little, it seems to me, the artificial brainy side of life, the worries and bills and the mechanisms of jobs, the doltish psychologies we’ve placed over our lives like a...

Baumauer has been lured into the exhausting habit of supplying Kalist with ever more exceptional quality work just to appease him and often survives all day and all evening without food, but Maxwell D. Kalist...

The usual short story cannot have a complex plot, but it often has a simple one resembling a chain with two or three links. The short short, however, doesn’t as a rule have even that...