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Where All the Heat Is
Fiction by Hannah Hollifield You start your period twenty minutes before Vacation Bible School. Your momma comes into the bathroom, hands you a tampon, and shows you how to stick the blue applicator in and send the cotton up. Then she hurries and y’all have to leave because the women’s study group is cooking the…
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Love in the Blood-Stained Blue Dot
A Review of Bobby Mathews, Magic City Blues By Wiley Reiver Alabama author Bobby Mathews has followed up his well-regarded 2022 release Living the Gimmick with the newly released Magic City Blues, a novel that, for all his first book’s strengths, reveals how dramatically Mathews is growing as a crime author. Blues depends on Mathews’…
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Those Little Rising Lights
By Cathy Ulrich Every morning, it’s still dark when I wake. Even in the longest days of summer, I wake before the sun. In the dark, I can see the lights from town. The airport sits atop the horizon, all red and white blinking lights. Without my glasses, they are blur and shimmer, not quite…
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TEXT ME BACK
Creative Nonfiction by Sara Gerot He left during the beginning of the COVID lockdown. I didn’t beg him to come back, which was the usual game wherein I would plead, apologize, and cajole. Though, to be honest, I did for the first couple days, but gave up, which was new. Back when I played the…
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Where My Words Come From
By Damon McKinney Growing up on a reservation in central Oklahoma wasn’t inspiring, at least at the time. Having Sunday dinners at my grandparents simple two-bedroom home wasn’t either, nor were the late nights at the family honkytonk, or running the streets of my hometown. Yet, those core memories are the anchors of my work.…
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I Know a Man
CNF by Kevin Brennan I know a man who will do things for you. Things you don’t want to do. I know a man who will get down and dirty. He’ll gird up for it, he’ll suit himself in hazmat skin. He’ll strap on goggles. He’ll tape his pant legs to his rubber boots. He’ll…
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The Road Never Ends
A Review of Craig Rodgers’ Drift By Eric Williams When reading Craig Rodgers’s forthcoming novel, Drift (Death of Print, 2023), I kept wanting to flip back to the inside cover and consult a map of the late capitalist America he writes about so sharply. Like the imaginary worlds documented at the front of paperback fantasy…
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Solving for X: Word Problems for Novelists
By Tiffany Quay Tyson In elementary school, I sometimes[1] read novels behind my math book. The teacher would write multiplication tables on the chalkboard or drone on about common denominators while I was fully immersed in some story by Lois Duncan or Louise Fitzhugh or Judy Blume. What was the point of memorizing multiplication tables…
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You Lament The Lack Of Asian Actors In American Cinema
Fiction by Eliot Li In your shopping cart at Safeway: a 10-pack of Top Ramen; jumbo box of Depends Undergarments that Grandma asked you to buy; AA batteries for your malfunctioning answering machine; this week’s SF Bay Guardian with Bruce Lee on the cover; and a pleasure pack of Trojans, because even though you’re single…
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Magic, Madness, Meaning
A Review of Jen Knox’ We Arrive Uninvited By Ashley Holloway What is the definition of a “strong female character”? A character who is physically strong and effective at wielding a multitude of weapons as she gracefully takes down the evil villain? Or is she more of a subtle badass like Elle Woods in Legally…