A man with the right scruffed-up beard and breadth of chest swaggered into the S and M dungeon that was my place of business, and twenty minutes and one grand later had my chin — still soft with the downy fluff of teen-girl skin — held steady in one paw while the other one flew at my face so hard and fast that I ceased to exist as the same collection of matter I had been the previous instant.
When Sarah’s mother, Penny, got sick four years into our marriage, we decided to move back to Mississippi, considering it penance for the sins of our youth. We signed a lease on a house, a white one-story on the historical register with a wraparound porch and angels, stars, and the moon painted on the transom above the front door.
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For National Short Story Month, we hope you’ll enjoy these fiction selections from The Sun’s archive. We’ve lifted our paywall during this period of isolation, so please feel free to share them with others.
We have removed the paywall on our website, so that subscribers and nonsubscribers alike have access to current issues, as well as our complete archives going back to 1974.
The Mission Creek Festival in Iowa City will be rescheduled.
Erin McReynolds’s essay “Train Songs” appears in our February 2020 issue, and we thought readers might appreciate hearing the songs she mentions in the piece.
Jackson’s poem in our February 2020 issue, “After the Reading,” details a fraught exchange after a poetry reading. Over e-mail he discussed listening to (and writing, and editing, and loving) poetry, and his affection for superhero comics -- especially the bad guys.
We’ve made the difficult decision not to attend this year’s AWP Conference in San Antonio.
From our 2019 tribute to Brian Doyle in Portland, Oregon.
We asked Louisa Willcox and David Mattson to share a few additional resources about grizzly bears and to suggest ways readers might be able to help.
We’re taking a hiatus from our “Into the Fire” retreats this year, but we hope to see you at some other events we’re planning.
Murphy says he has submitted stories to The Sun for about a decade, but this is the first we’ve published. We caught up to discuss his new story, his maritime exploits, and the most valuable lessons he learned from a mentor.