Boston Review — Fiction

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Joan Buggy

The Gulf

In later years I will come to avoid him, but for now, I am eight years old, and the man everyone says is my father is sitting in the living room.

Tania James

fiction

Summer of ’76

The Harper brothers acted as if they didn’t see Lola or her car, right in front of them, plain as day.
Phyllis Alexander

Mutts

Duchess, the dog that Jack and his dad brought home, is sitting by the kitchen table in a pair of women’s underpants.
David Riordan

Thirty Seconds From Now

“Something I want you to know about me,” Scott said. “I sense future sights, sounds, whatever while I sense the present.”
John Chu

Aviator on the Prowl

The winner of last year’s Boston Review Aura Estrada short-story contest.
Kalpana Narayanan
Introduced by Francisco Goldman

The Shunting Trains Trace Iron Labyrinths

I boarded the train and took the last empty seat, by the window. The woman next to me said, “This train goes to the coast.”
Ana Menéndez

You Are Free

Lara Barrows wondered how the woman had gotten her name, and how she’d found her address.
Danzy Senna

Guinea Pig

He’s sitting right in front of me now, a 130-pound Rottweiler named Casey, wearing a black helmet just like the one I’m holding in my hands.
Charles Johnson

Hitting Budapest

There are guavas to steal in Budapest, and right now I’d die for guavas, or anything for that matter. My stomach feels like somebody just took a shovel and dug everything out.
NoViolet Bulawayo

The Moor

The earliest known record of the negro detective Jackson Hieronymus Burke—the Moor—is an advertisement he ran in several Berlin newspapers in 1873, promising discretion and modest fees.
Ben Stroud

From the winner of the Bita Prize in Persian Letters, a story of a girl faced with the violence of the state. (Plus: “My Two Worlds,” Goli Taraghi’s Bita Prize lecture)
Goli Taraghi
translated by Faridoun Farrokh

Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

“He don’t look like he’s gonna be too talkative tonight–which is a blessin’. Otherwise you’d have to listen to him go on about how you’re goin’ to hell, like me and everybody I know.”
Samuel R. Delany

How Do I Explain?

The winner of of Boston Review’s 17th annual fiction contest, selected by
Chang-rae Lee.
Adam Sturtevant

Take the Child

“On one of those early mornings, she heard a small girl’s voice, thin, reedy, dry. She’d always thought, fantasized, that mothers communicated with their children telepathically.”
Jess Row

Seven Little Stories About Sex

“The father forgot to explain the sex part, how the sperm and the egg got to be in the same place at the same time and so for years the boy thought the sperm flew out of the man and through the air to where it entered the woman and multiplied like cancer.”
Eric Freeze

Wednesday Nights—memoir

“One constant of my childhood, as the youngest of seven, was this: I was forever laughing and crying at once.”
Vestal McIntyre

Everything is Breakable with a Big Enough Stone

“That month, her period was late. She missed it ferociously, even though it was such a pain and mess. She missed the way it had protected her for seven days and nights.”
Taryn Bowe

One, Two, Three, and Four Rabbits

and Where’s Your Sense of Humor?
“Later, it came, with its lowering throng of clouds laden with heavy and toxic gasses. Thus, though long-predicted, the annihilation came unexpectedly. Also unexpected was that some survived.”
Aura Estrada

Francisco Goldman discusses “The Wave” and the death of his wife Aura Estrada, after whom our short story contest is named.

Congratulations to NoViolet Bulawayo for winning the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing.

“I knew this writer was going to blow up,” said BR Fiction Editor Junot Díaz. “Her honesty, her voice, her formidable command of her craft—all were apparent from the first page.”

Read “Hitting Budapest,” her winning story from the November/December 2010 issue.