Most read stories

I Am

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When I was a boy, I always wondered if Dad were black. No one in our small town looked like Dad. He had the thick features of an Arab. If he let his hair grow, it piled up in messy loafs on his head. Of course, I never asked Dad about any of this. I wasn'

Love?

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There's a mutual recognition...

Squish-Squash

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Dan leaned back on his haunches and smoked. He was a massive man, not the type to sit like that. But he did. He sat like that, smoking and he said: “I feel like this kid I went to school with. Everybody called him Squish-Squash.” We asked him…

4 o' clock

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I still walk into galleries. A shadow of my old self still walks into galleries. That old self was hungry to be wounded by the juxtaposition of color and form and texture and line and darkness and light. But I can no longer see art. I can…

ANYONE but Shakespeare

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Shakespeare was Shakespeare, after all, the greatest poet the language has ever boasted: why did Shakespeare’s contemporaries even bother with their paltry efforts?

Peeling Onions

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I was in the kitchen peeling onions. They stung my eyes, and perhaps I was crying. I heard my dear husband run into the room and turned with the knife in my hand.

Forgetting Superman

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I forget you. Upfront: that’s how this ends.

Autobiography

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The story of my life/ would put insomniacs to sleep.

Sliver

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It was beautiful and bright and it felt so real.

If I’m honest

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We lived in a Holiday Inn trying not to be depressed that life had turned out to be so much like Eastenders, trying not to acknowledge that the thrill we’d got out of each other was the thrill of giving in to the wrong thing. We had more sex than ever b

diversion

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x

Strange and Silent Hands

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I shuddered. This is how we are chosen by strange and silent hands.

Waiting for a Terrorist

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Tents staked in desert land, a muted building of parched earth, in a thirty year old city with a napalm birth, they wait among gravestones in the sand.

D Evil in the D

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when the devil dies he divides enough evil for everybody

Boys of Summer in Yonkers (Memoir Excerpt # 1)

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Boys of summer in Yonkers played stickball and baseball.

The Faceless Girl Tells Stories

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spreading gilded pages with a tlickt

Yeah Yeah I Will I Promise

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After we have sex I slip cash into your purse, just a few bucks, without you knowing. You're not a whore, but I'd like to buy you lunch sometime without having to be there.

The Mommy's Girl

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Her mother dressed her like a little girl would dress a doll.

Too Quiet on the Carpet

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I've seen the pinch marks. It can't be worth it.

WWJRD

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On a visit, Jesus sees bracelets with WWJD. What does that mean? he asks. What Would Jesus Do? they respond. I wouldn’t wear that, he says.

Academic Papers & The People Who Write Them

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It distresses me that I do not write enough. I know I’ve told you before that I don’t read, and it may be super-ridiculous to tell you now that I don’t write much either, but that is the sad catastrophe I with affection refer to as my life.

postcards from penelope

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fun fact: a doll's legs will twitch while being scalped but only for just a little bit

Lenin's Paintings

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I was going through Lenin's jewelry and his paintings with a team of experts. I got the idea that I was hired to verify his paintings, although I didn't know he painted.

In a Pinch

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His worst nightmare had come true. He wasn't wearing green and all of the other kids were.

Love At Last

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They shared a lot through the years – a bus stop, acne, and first kiss stories. George was happy to be her confidant, good enough friends to help shoulder her burdens. But he wanted to push her curls back behind her ear and trace her soft cheek with his f

Featherbedding

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She sets the muffins aside, opens herself, nymph-like, mouth spread and gritty. She pulls the dirty edge of his gray t-shirt up so to show herself to him, spreads herself across the mattress like thin flesh oil over too much canvas....

Jim Morrison Is Not Dead

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At a good distance, he stood. Hair, gray, stringy, long as a horse’s mane. His beard, thick, unkempt. Like a caterpillar, a smile worked across his face. No, he said. It won’t be another Miami. Not another Miami.

Smooth Criminal

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In an early scene in Marvel's 2015 movie Ant-Man, the film's protagonist, Scott Lang, a convicted felon and former burglar, is summoned to his boss Dale's office at Baskin-Robbins."Three years at San Quentin, huh?" says Dale."You found out," Scott replies."Baskin-Robbins…

Tastes like Wind

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Sand underfoot.It's raining I say …

The Black Hole

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Matilda went wild at sixty-five. Legs left unshaven for the first time in fifty years, hair still and proud, knotted with forgetting. She’d roam the streets at night, a traveler without design. Matilda was a gardener of sorts, digging up all previous assu