Conversion

It’s Revival Day at Newbirth Evangelical, and I think I’ve got that post-traumatic thing soldiers get, like we learned about in school. It’s been a month, but after what happened at the last one, just seeing the word Revival creeps me out. I can feel my heart beating in my neck, and I’m not doing anything, just sitting. I can tell from the angle of the sun—the way it seems hell-bent on scorching a hole through my left pant leg—that the service is already running overtime. 
Read it at Guernica >

Notes on a War-Torn Childhood (With an Introduction by Justin Taylor)

"Nović's stories are sharp, dark, full of urgency and rich with the comedy of despair." -J.Taylor
  
I’m ten the night my house explodes. The sound isn’t a sound, just a vibration so strong it rattles my chest. I come-to face down on the floor, impossibly unharmed, and pull myself on my elbows across the carpet and into the hallway. A section of the house—the part where my parents’ bedroom is supposed to be—is missing.
Read it on Electric Literature>

On Late-Stage Pediatric Cardiomyopathy

(This story is a 2015 Pushcart prize nominee. Many thanks to the editors at  the minnesota review!) 

Should you find yourself coming-to while being wheeled out of your high school calculus class, it is best not to open your eyes.  Feign unconsciousness for a few more seconds, until the EMTs have turned the corner out into the hallway.  
Read more on the minnesota review blog >

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First World Problems: Rethinking the Plight of the War Correspondent

I first met Janine di Giovanni in the bathroom of the Brooklyn Brewery one sticky night in June, though she had been haunting me for weeks. Perhaps "meeting is the wrong word, because we did not speak, but I had followed her into the bathroom with every intention of speaking to her. Then, upon realizing our encounter could only be perceived as stalkeresque, I washed my hands and went to wait in line at the book table like a normal person.
Read it on LARB>

Ploughshares: Writing Lessons

There comes a time in all writing courses when a professor must call in the big guns, and raze a path on which our students can travel toward their writerly epiphanies. This summer, the time came when my students handed in drafts of their dramatic scenework, an assemblage of well-meaning but painfully direct dialogues...
...To combat [the problem], I brought in the biggest guns I knew—Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei, at their finest in My Cousin Vinny.
Read it on Ploughshares >

"Dreaming of Three Scrambled Eggs": Selected Translations

"At Dusk"  by Izet Sarajlić

On the soccer pitch
a boy
strums his guitar;
overhead
a grenade flies in from Poljina.


Read it on Circumference >

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Impossible Objects: In Defense of Truthiness in Creative Nonfiction

I’ve been at work on a novel about the Yugoslav Civil War for a few years now, and I can’t get more than a sentence or two into a description of the thing before my colleagues are red in the face, near bursting with the desire to interject. They lean in close— they’re in possession of a real trade secret— and offer up that most hated advice:
 
Read it on Blunderbuss >

On "Pimping One's Heritage," Or Things White Men Say to Feel Better About Themselves

Having been at work on a novel about the civil wars in Yugoslavia for a few years now, I often find myself oscillating between worry and defiance in the matter of being pegged as an “ethnic writer.” Technically a Second World country in the Cold War era, the former Yugoslavia is just as soon considered the Third World by most Americans who don’t know the Second World was even a thing. 
Read it on Apogee >

Rethinking Deaf Rights, Education, Cochlear Implantation, and the future of deafness

Redeafined is a magazine concerned with restoring the balance of information surrounding deaf issues. Media attention and current educational philosophy reveals a striking double standard in the way the Deaf community is portrayed; we reject the notion that deaf people can only be "normal" through surgical alteration, and advocate for bilingual ASL-English education.

See more on Redeafined>