More on: fiction

When things went wrong—and they did, some things went terrifyingly wrong—he turned to prayer. He opened his hands to an unknowable God and prayed as best he could.

Mama kept informing us that the Lord would provide if we only had faith the size of a mustard seed, but Timothy and I pretended not to hear.

What is heaven but the immortal fulfillment of a mortal longing? What is it but the most sublime synthesis of memory and dream?

It was another year or two before Brother Thibault whispered to Gérard the secret of his salt. He had, apparently, received unearthly assistance.

Doesn’t a fire, good and hot, burn back into a wound until there’s nothing left for it to do but heal?

IT WAS MY IDEA to volunteer as a clown, but it was my therapist who suggested that I work as a mute because I am so talkative. That way I’d have to use my face and props to communicate instead of words. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it’d be, for I quickly got…

BETWEEN SLEEP AND WHAT FOLLOWS sleep, she pushes against water, gasping for air. It’s not until she wakes—at the edge of daylight—that her mind registers two thoughts simultaneously: that her knees ache, that Albert is still dead. On this, a Sunday morning, a third thought follows as she begins moving her legs to the edge of…

THIS IS THE SEQUENCE of events that led to Peter Bumble’s downfall: in 1958, as you well know, the Totochabo regime came to power in a military coup that claimed the lives of thousands. Immediately following this, as a first order of business, stairs were declared outdated and no longer practicable for living. The lower stories…

The Televangelist by Ibrahim Essa, translated by Jonathan Wright (American University in Cairo Press, 2016) The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette (Melville House, 2016) “The Boy Jihadi” by Youssef Rakha (Guernica, 2015)   IN THE EARLY HOURS of January 1, 2011, a bomb was set off among New Year’s Eve worshippers…

JAMES Wood is a literary critic to die for. Earnest, passionate, and erudite, Wood’s lucid, distinctive voice has cut a wide swathe through what often seem like the mutterings and tergiversations of contemporary literary discourse. Still in his thirties, this British expatriate is now the in-house critic at The New Republic and his first collection…