Catapult
A Conversation With Best Debut Short Stories 2020 Author Valerie Hegarty
“Some studies have actually found that a cat’s purring can help mend broken bones.”
A Conversation With Best Debut Short Stories 2020 Author Ani Cooney
“Since March, how many have had to grow up fast and be valorous because of amoral, wicked, and cowardly leadership?”
in & out of jean shorts (the reel catches)
I wish for sex out / in the open, to have / some strange body / glide over mine, to collide / as if to butterfly / underwater required not one / but two sets of salty / chests & jutting / calves
A Conversation With Best Debut Short Stories 2020 Author Damitri Martinez
“I cling to art, sometimes as my only saving grace.”
A Conversation With Best Debut Short Stories 2020 Author Mohit Manohar
“Interracial love has been codified and digitized, and we’ve found that it sells less ads, is less addictive, than its alternative.”
A Conversation With Best Debut Short Stories 2020 Author Mbozi Haimbe
“I decided to subvert readers’ expectations in terms of the narrative of a diaspora visiting their homeland in order to challenge the myth that all those arriving home from the west are endowed with bags of cash.”
Is This Your Sky or Mine?
The body just births more questions and that’s my future.
A Roundtable With the PEN America Best Debut Short Stories Judges: Tracy O’Neill, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Deb Olin Unferth
So many of the stories I liked best played with understatement and a sort of quiet, confident pacing.
I’m not like you
and don’t you ever forget / it takes practice to access what you demolished / when you see us / you feel something for the first time
No Beast, Don’t Bend
I am a body surrendered fully to nature, captured in this house, left sitting on haunches in corners under blankets.