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Newest poetry:

The next time you survey your land, your land will accommodate your skull by DANIELLE PAFUNDA

Take note and heed. My drab elastic shackle worried the bone

to dart. Poison tipped present day cervix fasting, preparatory.

Ugly Park looms, and I file its gates. Specific access: trees

denied, fur denied, zing and whoosh denied, all water denied.

Dark denied, particle-free oxygens denied, nutrients denied.

Girls, boys, tom-toms, flowers, spoons, ink, porcelain, fruit,

tone, flint, exploration, and tonic fetal compass denied.

2 July 2009 | poetry

Newest fiction:

New Lease by JOSEPH P. THAYER

The nurse pulls my legs one way and my arms the other, positioning me to her liking. Her face is beautiful, like a magazine cover, and I lie across the cold metal table like a wounded dog, my side pressed flat against the surface. A long-armed x-ray device hangs over my head. She smiles, and I lose myself in her face, imagine myself wandering into Candy Land; I walk over her gumdrop eyes.

My wife is beautiful too, but she's not here. When I told her I was going for some tests she said, okay—you're fine. She said nothing about my tendency to over dramatize or my need for attention. She didn't ask why she should care or if womanizing could cause cancer.

23 June 2009 | fiction, flash fiction

Newest nonfiction:

Five Questions with T.C. Boyle About The Women by BRYAN HURT

Bryan Hurt: The historian and literary critic Hayden White has said that all historical narrative (biographies, journals, chronicles, etc.) are forms of fiction, no more or less so than their literary counterparts. For you (a) what are the reasons for, and advantages of, exploring the past through the form of the novel? And (b) why use the past (i.e. "actual people") at all?

T.C. Boyle: I agree most emphatically with Mr. White. Which is part of the fun I'm having with The Women and other historical narratives I've pursued. In the present case, we have actual people doing actual things as reported in newspaper and biographical accounts, but their actions are filtered through the recollections of the book's editor, Tadashi Sato, who responds in footnotes to the rather odd text he's received in translation and amplification from his grandson-in-law, the unpublished Irish-American novelist, Seamus O'Flaherty. Where, one wonders, does the truth reside? Not simply the truth of fiction, but the truth of history.

8 June 2009 | nonfiction, interview

Song by ROBERT BURNS

1 June 2009 | poetry, classic

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