It is a joy for a non-scientist like me to lose myself in descriptions of the exquisitely designed life cycles of pecan trees, maple trees, wild strawberries, witch hazel, black ash, and cattails.
Hannah Green’s Xanax Cowboy is a long poem—a total of 128 pages—that interrogates
This is my year of reading short story collections, and this book exploded my understanding of what you could do with the “novel in short stories” form. The dust jacket describes it as a novel, and it follows a single protagonist, named Nina. But many of the stories that comprise it were published separately and several made it into collections like The Journey Prize anthology, and that’s because they make such powerful use of the condensed tension of the short story.
Our 2024 Fiction Contest, judged by Zilla Jones, closes on Tuesday, September 3. Don't miss your chance to submit! Check out our guidelines here.
When I arrived at my designated campsite on my first camping trip, I encountered a black bear. It was bent over a picnic table two camp sites over, its snout riffling through crumbs and crusts on abandoned paper plates. My childhood friend, a bear expert who was working at Algonquin Park that summer, was shocked. She said she hadn’t seen bears roaming this close to the campsites all summer. She assured me that the likelihood of it coming back was slim, but I wasn’t convinced.
