When I was sixteen, I accidentally choked out Brian Herskowitz. One second he was trying to pull down on my sleeve and reduce the pressure on his neck, and the next he was very quiet, face down on the mat. I let go and sat back, not sure what to do.

The Leavers is a dual narrative about Polly and her son Deming. Leon is Polly’s boyfriend and Deming’s stepfather during the years they live together in New York City. He works in a slaughterhouse as a meat cutter. I wrote this scene in which Leon and his friend Quan go to a cockfight early on the writing process.

Years later, a man described why the gods of finance couldn’t wipe everyone’s debt and / start over. Everyone’s debt is another person’s asset. That autumn, the bank did not / call. The bank sent letters in nondescript envelopes. Invitations to pay a past-due balance.

The first drafts I wrote of the novel, then somewhat portentously called American Eden, had more or less the same storyline and structure, but contained a kinetic central section set in Harlem and midtown. In those drafts, my wayward protagonists are still headed for the west coast; they just happen to find themselves with a two-day layover in the New York on their way there.

Terry got his hands out in front of him, telling me not to go nowhere. He starts moving over to my side of the car and I see the two Perkins girls is looking at us from the sidewalk. They hair glistening and freshly parted in thick twists with elastic ball barrettes, like oversized Lemonheads and Red Hots. They looking at me and Terry. He coming around to my window and I’m thinking about them girls watching us, wondering how many times a kid needs to see some shit like this before they give up on the pretty daydreams taped to they bedroom walls.

Ornela Vorpsi’s The Country Where No One Ever Dies (Dalkey Archive 2009) belongs among the very best post-communist novels. The novel, which was published originally in Italian in 2003, explores the traumas of authoritarianism, hyper-sexualized patriarchy, and violence in many forms, offering raw and poetic insights into individual and collective memory, migration/exile, and the meaning of art and literature.

“Who but a maniac or a goddamn fool would sit down and write a novel attacking marriage? And who’d want to read such a novel?” For Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road, these questions were rhetorical. His defensive stance came from what he always saw as a wild misreading of his famous 1961 novel.

Epiphany’s Fall/Winter 2017 issue features an excerpt from Naivo's Beyond the Rice Fields, the first Malagasy novel translated into English. The novel’s central love story unfolds in dialogue with the cultural and political developments of early nineteenth-century Madagascar following the arrival of the first British missionaries. Naivo explores the conflict between traditional Malagasy culture and mounting European influence in the very form of his novel, which was inspired by the hainteny oral poetry tradition. Epiphany’s editor-in-chief Tracy O’Neill spoke with Naivo and his translator Allison M. Charette at Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore in November of 2017.

There is no better time to read Elena Georgiou’s collection The Immigrant’s Refrigerator, which explores boundaries—both physical and emotional—and how they shape individual’s identity and community (both adopted and home). Georgiou translates the experience of exile as her characters try to find love amid displacement or celebrate the intimacy of a shared meal against the backdrop of unspeakable violence. The Immigrant’s Refrigerator reminds us that “home” is in reality an unfixed, fluid state always being negotiated by the personal, political, cultural.

When I first moved to New York, I spent hours walking around the city. I had no idea where I was, so everything counted as a discovery.

Since 1976, the Pushcart Prize has honored writers of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. This year, we're proud to nominate the following writers for their outstanding contributions to the literary landscape.

I first met Kenny Fries at The MacDowell Colony, when he was talking happily about a fellowship in Tokyo starting that summer.  By chance, I had already signed up for a hiking trip outside Kyoto and I decided to pop in on Kenny at the end of it.  That was the first of three visits with him as guide and companion.  I saw how his deep interest and respect for Japanese culture won him the tender regard of people wherever we went.  As a fiction writer, I have always loved the way his writing links the events of his own life with questions raised by the narratives of history.

The Chinese often describe death as a walking out of life — 
“he walked” or “he left.” A simple gesture, leaving
the room unannounced, a quiet slippage from one body into the next. 

*

My mother’s father died on Halloween. They said
the ghouls took him. In Taipei, a door slammed
shut. In America, I went trick-or-treating, counted
the Snickers and the Smarties, licked my fingers. 

They burned his body down to powder. At the funeral, 
we lit fake money and paper flowers on fire. The ashes
could have been anybody; I stared into its face.

I’ve heard other writers say that a story starts for them with an image, one that develops in their minds without any provocation. They can spring up like Vine videos, short six-second bursts of an image in motion. That’s how this story began for me. I saw a tattoo, or rather a fuzzy, blurry image of a tattoo, deep red in color. I didn’t know what it was of—some kind of animal, maybe. I thought it had legs, but I wasn’t sure.

Carl Linnaeus, the “father of modern taxonomy,” wrote this line in 1729:

The flowers’ leaves . . . serve as bridal beds which the Creator has so gloriously arranged, adorned with such noble bed curtains, and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much the greater solemnity.

I think he was obsessed with both sex and flowery language. 

Readers of literary fiction have a compelling new anthology to read this fall. PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017 features twelve authors, selected by judges Marie-Helene Bertino, Kelly Link, and Nina McConigley. Each writer received the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers in this, its inaugural year. We’re pleased that Ruth Serven’s story, “A Message,” published in our Fall 2016 issue, was recognized.

Many of the stories in the collection are told by characters who break molds; they are outliers in their societies, and in reading their stories we understand something of what it means to endure in their worlds. These are unexpected tales that satisfy and perplex. In other words, they expand our narrative expectations.

Series editor Yuka Igarashi answered some questions for us about the collection, editorial work for literary journals, and the power of hearing stories read aloud.