An independent, ad-free leftist magazine of critical essays, poetry, fiction, and art.

  • The cover of We Had it Coming by Luke O'Neil, showing a mother with two children running on a beach in a film photograph.
    We Had it Coming [EXCERPTS]

    Three new short stories by Luke O’Neil—”The rules,” “How to live,” and “Something that was once potentially good”—are excerpted here from his new book of stories, We Had it Coming, out from OR Books.

  • Newburyport, MA

    From Issue IV: Luke O’Neil’s short story “Newburyport, MA” renders a memory in the timbre of modern experience, where diffuse horrors punctuate the everyday.

  • A hyperdimensional fractal render.
    [Rant] Stop judging transdimensional entities for what’s between their legs

    Riley Tao shares a humorous piece of speculative fiction on the workplace discrimination experienced by transdimensional entities on a distant universal plane.

  • The Law Mine

    The latest in fiction: Max Rachimburg shares “The Law Mine,” a parable about the prevailing order. Is the law objective, divine, derived from nature? Or is it something we make?

  • Outgrowth

    Lucy Zhang’s “Outgrowth” is a surrealist fable, exploring themes of the biological, the body, consumption, and human bonding.

  • The Angel Is In

    Carl Harris writes with a piece of surrealist fiction about the townspeople that confront a new reality: a city in the sky, populated by an angel named Matt.

  • Children of the Nkalagu Mine

    Ani Kayode Somtochukwu, in “Children of the Nkalagu Mine,” visits a beautiful world in which the dream of African liberation—peace, environmental justice, and genuine democracy—has been realized.

  • The Origins of Cling Wrap

    “The Origins of Cling Wrap” by ish ibrahim tells the tale of a woman planting seeds in the heart of New York. Filled with grief for a changing climate, it meditates on the confluence of the city, the Earth, and our small and precious lives.

  • Remediation

    “Remediation,” by Whitney Curry Wimbish, is a surreal reflection on the loss of things held dear—our relationships with our environment and ourselves.

  • The End of a World

    Isaac Black offers a mediation on parental anxieties amidst the absurdities of contemporary capitalism. “Doing nothing is a luxury, I said to her in the singsong voice that babies understand.”