The Short Fiction Competition is open for entries! The judge is the dazzling Tommy Orange, whose debut novel, There There, won the 2019 PEN/Hemingway Award, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was among the most acclaimed books of the year.
The editors are thrilled to announce the release of our Spring 2019 edition, designed by the trailblazing graphic and landscape designer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon
Three stories from our 2018 catalog have been selected for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories 2019 anthology
What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?
—Lord Byron
I paint from historical photographs. My subjects have been prostitutes, refugees, street performers, soldiers, laborers, and prisoners, among others. By washing these subjects in veils of dripping linseed oil, I both preserve and destroy the image. My style has been called a kind of weeping realism that embodies ideas like the erosion of memory and the passage of time. I try to summon the ghosts of history into the present.
I was born in China in 1948, near the end of the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. In 1968—at the age of twenty—I was sent to the countryside for proletarian reeducation during the Cultural Revolution. I worked as a peasant for four years, mostly growing wheat and corn. I remember one day looking up from the field and seeing an airplane high overhead, cutting silently through the sky. I wondered where it was . . .
