OSU MFA alum and star kickballer Doug Watson’s featured on Day 19 of The Missouri Review’s Short Story Month.

Here’s the first one:

Studio

For safety’s sake, the iron escape
folds up from the ground. Bad limb
that won’t go down, I’m asking
for it, party clothes the all
of what I own. Even this cat I can’t
claim, wandered-in thing clawing the low
tulle in the closet, the dress
my every memory, the cat a flame
in an ashcan, batting the fringe
of the window hanging: this is trauma.

Either that, or this is romance.
He lived in an enormous house for artists,
sufficiently dark and malformed
to suggest the interior space of the body,
small peace and the snaps of fever
and light: ALMOST HEAVEN, he said.
I hope to be let in when I almost
die. When you live in a ghost town,
every               hole’s an eye

newyorker:

Our Page-Turner blog asked a group of novelists how often the question of likeability has been posed about their characters: http://nyr.kr/16CpZCS

Illustration by Roman Muradov

proustitute:

Emily Dickinson’s manuscript of “[The way Hope builds his House]”

nouvellabooks:

LAUNCH week for Derek Palacio’s How to Shake the Other Man is already half gone, and there are so few share packages left on our shelves that they’re getting lonely.

Read an excerpt from this extraordinary novella courtesy of our good friends at Electric Literature. And then waste no time; get to the site!

 

theparisreview:

Writer and contributor Rachel Kushner talks with the Los Angeles Review of Books about her new novel, The Flamethrowers, mixing history with fiction, and why she became a writer.

The Journal has extended the deadline for submissions to its second annual contests in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to May 15. Applications may be submitted online via The Journal’s online Submittable submissions manager. For more information, consult the guidelines on the submission form or The Journal’s blog.

Out Today: Derek Palacio,”How to Shake the Other Man”

“How to Shake the Other Man,” which many of us fictioneers will remember as “The King Crow of New York,” is published by Nouvella Books, an innovative press publishing only novellas by emerging writers. I don’t have to tell you guys how rare both those endeavors are, and how important they are to writers & readers like us. Nouvella is a labor of love, and can use all the support they can get.

— Claire Vaye Watkins