before she could contemplate doing something for herself with her time

twelve new years

Mei had been in jail for six months and a handful of days.

He had once asked his mother to describe his father’s face, a question whose weight he did not recognise until he had been older.

但巡迴遊樂園並不害怕，只要再次拆卸自毀，它們換個地方就可以重新活過來。
| As long as the traveling carnival committed self-destruction, it could come alive once more in a different place.

Reimagining the Malayan Emergency

A collage of conversations between Shruti Swamy and Meng Jin

A conversation with the author of Disorientation.

A handful of us scream in recognition like sea flares on a dance floor.

You convinced me of the queer soul of the world.

A flash folio edited by Yi Wei

Even now you can feel her, flickering. 

Haunting a house isn’t as easy as you might think.

So much of art is speaking, but art can only be made by listening to the world around us, forming our own distinctive definitions of that world in tandem with what we learn and who we choose to look for.

The most important love we have will always be for ourselves and our lives. It is only from this lodestar, our own definition and practice of love, that we can turn love back out into the world and towards our people.

Sometimes, she was just so hard to reason with.

It isn’t like her to chase what’s unattainable.

I’ve been reading up on comfort and chaos. I like missing you.

How many times she must have labored to make you stop crying, and how many times she held you, acknowledging your pain as you cried.

This is my friend, the K-pop star.

We’d video-game or anime-binge or dream aloud about a future as bright as our childhoods.

“A Beautiful Relationship” and “The Price of Freedom”

Our sonorous, sorrowful Korean.

She looked up at the high walls. There were some things even they couldn’t keep out.

Every nonhuman living thing is held captive by our actions.

құсың түлкі алса бүркіт, алмаса лау мінген шүршіт |
If your bird gets a fox, then it is an eagle; if not, then it is lightning riding a lion

ياق، توختاڭلار! بۇ بۇغداي سېلىقى توغرىسىدىكى سۆز ئەمەس، مانا بۇ يەردە باشنى يە، دەپتۇ |
“No, stop it! This isn’t talking about a tax on wheat, look, it says bashni ye here, that’s ‘eat your head.’”

I want to live inside it though: pale birds and fragile light and a novel kind of solitude.

I bring the child closer to me and inhale, prepared for the musty smell of old men. It never comes.

The witch listened to nothing but her water heart.

All the koi fish in our pond died, except one.

When I left, I stretched far enough away that any tethers I had severed. Now a place exists without me.

All these familiar but strange things that make up his wife.

I killed my old self to see if I would finally return home to myself.

The dead decided to live upon us, demanding a second chance.

She had a dream the night before about catching a pig, which her father used to tell her was a prelude for great fortune.

There are ghosts who haunt and ghosts who kill.

I feel him taking my hands in his and kissing them every time he saw me.

There were no windows opened. There were dimmed lights. There were crumbs beneath the table.

Fourteen flash fiction stories on the places and people that stay with us

The groundbreaking art and visual vocabulary of Chitra Ganesh

Most of us who love the past live among what remains.

That’s one thing I’ll say about the aliens: they really appreciate a good bowl of ramen.

Stars, trees, lasers, lights, everything locking into nothing, everything together yet apart.

A notebook on alchemy, memory, and sensation

She selected a single star on which to direct her attention. We are one light, she told herself.

We learned about our Other Brother on a summer afternoon.

Everybody thinks you become someone different when you’re someplace different, but it’s not true, you come back and you turn the same again.

These days I’ve grown tired of my heart, how much feeling it has required, and would much prefer to laugh.

People talk about the dead sometimes having unfinished business with the living, but my case was the opposite.

She was a prisoner in this home, where death and decay had collected like a fog.

She should moisturize more often, drink at least three liters of hot water with lemon each day, and wear silicon sheet masks to bed to hide the stigmata of a woman who was everything.

Our five-part series comes to a close with these 33 titles.

“Big rain, isn’t it?”

It wasn’t the kind of place you’d notice as a casual passer-by, but one you could only find if you were looking for it.

As soon as they touch your saliva, the filaments dissolve. Their structure can’t sustain the contact. The sweetness is the taste of collapse.

A two-minute stare-down with their father’s deathbed occurs. As though the thing will explain itself.

She kissed a fingertip and touched it to the frayed edge of a small sketch of her face. It was all she had left of him, a drawing that he had made of her.

Astra unwrapped her long spindly fingers and weighed his member with a chilling fascination.

I will outrun the smell of wet decay, your Mekong river in a Gatorade bottle.

The dysthemic artificial intelligence scientist took a book of poetry off the shelf and sat on her couch. What was she ushering in and what was a grand program for which she was simply helpless agent?

Văn An had neglected ritual, not realizing that this was a land now full of ghosts left too long unmoored. That there might be consequences for forgetting to fear.

I keep the butts of my clove cigarettes in a candy tin. I pound it shut, hide it away. So it stays a secret.

My child, we all become white-haired soon enough.

This was the first time he had seen so many exiled Tibetans of his own flesh and blood in a foreign land. Though they were only a few feet away, it was as if they were separated by ranges of mountains.

From its very beginning this story is fated to be exposed by the light.

The author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace reflects on writing out of desperation, Fiona Apple, and the novel as a ghostly space.

The award-winning writer talks about her new acclaimed short story collection, the anxiety of exile, and figuring out which narrative you belong to.

Scotch-taped at the mirrors’ edges were photographs of birthdays, family vacations, running in the rain. Their edges had curled from sixteen years of steam from hot showers and baths.

The author of How I Became a North Korean speaks about the power of fiction to give clarity to the world.

‘Where was Mas Han? What was he running from? And why hadn’t he called or tried to get in contact with me? These were my questions, those of a wife, a woman, who had no idea how what had happened would affect the fate of the Indonesian people.’

Debut novelist of The Hundred-Year Flood talks lower-body ghosts, communication subterfuge, and American entitlement

An excerpt from Chang-rae Lee’s On Such A Full Sea

We were both Ahab; the difference was that Einstein, when he set out on the ink-black sea, knew not what monster he had been pursuing.

“It had always been that one of Norton’s fondest dreams—the dream, I think, of many brilliant and overextended men—was that one month, or one year, he’d find himself in a warm place with absolutely no commitments.”

Swati Marquez interviews Bushra Rehman on her new work of fiction, Corona.

An excerpt from Sinan Antoon’s novel, “The Corpse Washer”

Matthew Salesses on the power of words and appearances.