From A PUBLIC SPACE …I tell you this longish anecdote as a way to prepare you for what I see as the magic in Jamel Brinkley’s stories. These stories deal in large-scale deceit and betrayal, there are painful things at work in this fiction, but much like the scene I described above, Jamel Brinkley regularly […]
Sex Coffee by Desiree Cooper You walk into the coffeehouse and pick a seat beside the thin woman whose beauty is coiled into tight vines of hair. Never seen her here before, you think as you slide into the bench beside her, careful not to get caught looking in her direction. You take off your […]
ROMEO NO. 3 Robert don’t need no help pulling girls, now. But when the Dream Date came to Burrell for its Hometown Hunks series, I just had to jump at my chance. See, I’m the type of brother that’s always taking chances. Be it quitting school to become an entrepreneur—because I’m going to have my […]
Lesley Arimah is a Kimbilio Fellow who, at the last minute was unable to attend the summer retreat. Her story “Who Will Greet You At Home” appears in the October 26 edition of The New Yorker. The yarn baby lasted a good month, emitting dry, cotton-soft gurgles and pooping little balls of lint, before Ogechi […]
Frightful Weather Outside (A You Tube Video) Brian Gilmore (as published in Fjords Review – Black American Special Edition 2015) 2006 Freddie Que dressed up as Santa Claus. Handing out small gifts to kids in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. People around him passing by looking for a cocaine fix and there […]
No, you couldn’t be at Kimbilio 2015, but you can read the piece that Deesha shared at the Fellow’s reading: HOW CAN YOU BE MAD AT SOMEONE WHO’S DYING OF CANCER How can you be mad at someone who’s dying of cancer? It helps if you don’t yet know she’s dying, if you think the doctors are just […]
Paradox Lana closed the bedroom door firmly behind her, but it didn’t block out their noise. Even in the elusive moments when screams and screeches and sobbing stopped bouncing off of every solid surface, the reverberation remained. No stranger to self-sacrifice, Lana had done what she was expected to do, until, of course, she discovered […]
You Can Feel It Like a Demon, Swallowing You Slow: An Interview with Marlon James By Andrew Ervin | August 13th, 2014 – 09:00 am Marlon James is no longer a promising writer. He’s no longer a writer of enormous potential. That’s because his third novel A Brief History of Seven Killings places him securely among our most vital contemporary […]
