Flash fiction

The Four Worst Paint Names We Came Across At Home Depot Upon Failing To Pick A New Color For The Empty Spare Room Pompeii Ruins (dark gray) A week prior,…

* * * They arrive a few minutes earlier than anticipated, deviating from the embossed schedule that sits crumpled within my hand. The sound of them slicing across the horizon…

* * * You hold your clenched fist out to me, palm up, fingers wrapped around an unseen object. I hold your gaze as I unwrap them, one by one.…

* * * And I wish for a moment, a moment to breathe. There is my teenage son, his knee bouncing under the kitchen table; my father, calling voicelessly for…

Whack! I crimp cable in a computer factory. Never successfully. No matter how hard I try to master crimp connection, the inspector calls me back and asks if I know…

THE NEXT WAVE They might think that our gym obsession is about exercise, a healthy lifestyle, a swimsuit body, but we know better. We say nothing as we steadily climb…

“Don’t go too far,” the woman at the Diamond Door Health Spa said as I tied my running shoes. “These things happen fast.” Oh, but it’s a sparkling day with…

It’s simple really: I look for queer/trans writers who are making beautiful, powerful work. I love the weird, experimental, avant-garde work that is coming from the margins, and I want to center that work as best as I can. To tack down exactly what I’m after at Damaged Goods is something I haven’t done yet. I’m just publishing work that speaks the loudest to me.

I am standing at the kitchen sink. I turn on the hot water, a little to the left, until it is on the verge of scalding but not quite, not…

Gutshot by Amelia Gray FSG Originals, 2015 224 pages — FSG / Amazon Amelia Gray has a knack for characters. In the thirty-eight short stories that comprise Gutshot, her latest collection,…

Does the boy’s hand tremble when he doesn’t know the chronological order of events? Does his temple throb with tension when he doesn’t remember the powers Congress has over the…

We embrace our smallness and the high quality that our present size allows us to maintain, as well as the financial viability it affords us. Bigness for its own sake is overrated. It feels more true to our mission to be big in terms of the reputation of our books and the notice and support our authors receive than to be big in terms of how many books we produce each year.

One of the beautiful things about Ricochet is the aesthetics (as well as the class, sexual orientations, and ethnic backgrounds) of those who make up our board are all over the map. As someone who helped found the board, this was really important to me. I’m not interested in putting out books by people who look and sound like me. I’m interested in those manuscripts that are thrilling and important, regardless of the details of the author or her aesthetic practices. If my blood pressure goes up (in a good way), I know I’ve found something. I don’t know that getting any more specific is worthwhile, as it will only exclude work I would likely love.

Blood a Cold Blue by James Claffey Press 53, October 2013 Press 53 / Amazon I’ve recently dug deep into James Claffey’s first collection of short, short stories, Blood a Cold Blue…