Fiction

Surveilled Terrain

Surveilled Terrain

March 5, 2026 ,

By THOMAS EMPL 
Translated by ISABEL FARGO COLE

The ferryman wrenched the gangplank out of its mount, heaved a breath and hooked it between the boat and the dock. During the brief ride we didn’t say a word; he didn’t recognize us. On the coast, to the east of the town, a military jet took off and dipped straight into a breakneck loop to head the other way, trailing its sonic boom.

I’d shaved the night before. Mouth open, I fingered my smooth skin. Rough lines ran from my nostrils to the corners of my mouth, like incisions. My ears looked huge. When I got up in the morning, my mirror image startled me. It was as if someone had hung up one of those photos I never looked at, showing that out-of-place apprentice, expressionless at the joiner’s bench. I didn’t recognize myself until I heard my voice.

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Biography of a Dress

Biography of a Dress

February 23, 2026

By JAMAICA KINCAID

This story is reprinted in honor of Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival, which features Jamaica Kincaid as a guest author. Register and see the full list of LitFest 2026 events here.

Early photograph of the author in a light-colored dress.

Image courtesy of the author.

The dress I am wearing in this black-and-white photograph, taken when I was two years old, is a yellow dress made of cotton poplin (a fabric with a slightly un-smooth texture first manufactured in the French town of Avignon and brought to England by the Huguenots, but I could not have known that at the time), and it was made for me by my mother. This shade of yellow, the color of my dress that I was wearing when I was two years old, was the same shade of yellow as boiled cornmeal, a food that my mother was always eager for me to eat in one form (as a porridge) or another (as fongie, the starchy part of my midday meal) because it was cheap and therefore easily available (but I did not know that at the time), and because she thought that foods bearing the colors yellow, green, or orange were particularly rich in vitamins and so boiled cornmeal would be particularly good for me. But I was then (not so now) extremely particular about what I would eat, not knowing then (but I do now) of shortages and abundance, having no consciousness of the idea of rich and poor (but I know now that we were poor then), and would eat only boiled beef (which I required my mother to chew for me first and, after she had made it soft, remove it from her mouth and place it in mine), certain kinds of boiled fish (doctor or angel), hard-boiled eggs (from hens, not ducks), poached calf’s liver and the milk from cows, and so would not even look at the boiled cornmeal (porridge or fongie). There was not one single thing that I could isolate and say I did not like about the boiled cornmeal (porridge or fongie) because I could not isolate parts of things then (though I can and do now), but whenever I saw this bowl of trembling yellow substance before me I would grow still and silent, I did not cry, that did not make me cry.

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Juiced

Juiced

January 22, 2026

By NEYSA KING

This piece is an excerpt from the novel How to Be Loved.

 

Cláudia’s eyeliner is dark as earth and heavy as her parrot-red lipstick. As she bends over to speak to me in low tones, her blouse falls open. I don’t know what it means to be attracted to her; I just want to be near her body. But she’s a college student from Rio, and I’m five years old. For the last year she’s been my nanny—dressing me, feeding me while Mom and Dad work. Every other Friday, if I’m good, she shucks me into my two-piece bathing suit with frills on the bottom and a pink butterfly on top and takes me to Singing Beach, where I can play with the skinny-legged sandpipers that the ocean is lava. Run, chase, run, chase, run, chase—my long, dark curls wet and heavy, and my suit bottom sliding down my straight hips—until the sunlight stretches as long and pale as a skeleton across the sand.

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Playing Chicken

Playing Chicken

January 14, 2026 ,

By MAR GÓMEZ GLEZ

Translated from the Spanish by SARAH THOMAS

Translator’s Note:

In the two decades that I have known Mar Gómez Glez, she has established herself as one of the most memorable and unique voices of her generation of Spanish writers. Mar’s output is impressive in its creativity, complexity, and the diversity of its genres and subjects: three novels, more than twice as many plays, a children’s book, and two non-fiction books (a study of Saint Teresa of Ávila and a cultural history of blood). These works treat a wide variety of topics ranging from pressing political themes to the deeply personal autobiographical content of her novel in vignettes La edad ganada, from which this text is drawn. What all her work shares in common is a deep ethical concern with human experience, the connections forged and broken between us, and our responsibility to others. 

Among these diverse works, La edad ganada is one of the most experimental and personal. It brings fresh form to the bildungsroman: standalone chapters offer snapshots of an unnamed protagonist’s coming of age from two to thirty, their sequential numeric titles indicating her age (in the original, this text is titled “veinticuatro” or “twenty-four”). Across the stories, the narrative point of view constantly shifts, at times in daring or surprising ways, but the protagonist’s experience and voice remain at the center of the text. While deeply personal, the work also speaks to deeper ethical and relational imperatives. This chapter, which I have called “Playing Chicken” in the translation, is rooted in cultural specificity—the bureaucracy of Spanish universities, the classic winter stew cocido madrileño—but also explores a story that is all too familiar and universal: of power imbalance, the unspoken expectations articulated just below the surface of what is explicitly said, and the potentially devastating consequences of playing along.

—Sarah Thomas

 

Playing Chicken

They had arranged to meet in the park at 2 pm sharp. The student arrived at quarter to, and sat on a bench, watching the children play to entertain herself. The air was strangely cold, a springtime chill that came and went.

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Raid on the Roma Camp

Raid on the Roma Camp

December 11, 2025 ,

By THEODORA BAUER
Translated by AARON CARPENTER

Piece appears below in English and the original German

 

Translator Note

Theodora Bauer’s novel Chikago (2017) follows two sisters from the Croatian minority in Burgenland, Austria. In this stand-alone chapter we learn that the family was ostracized from the small community in one of the poorest, but also most ethnically diverse regions in Austria. Burgenland was part of Hungary while under Hapsburg rule and is still home to Hungarian and Croatian minorities. This chapter begins with an idyllic trip that the father and his youngest daughter take to the village to do some business. When they hear a group of drunken townspeople plan on raiding the Roma camp just outside of town, where the father’s smithy is, they race back home to warn them.

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Corazon

Corazon

November 18, 2025

By ISABEL CRISTINA LEGARDA



Excerpted from The Conviction of Things Not Seen, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2025.

 

The cemetery had inhabitants, and not just those whose descendants had laid them to rest. Two old men were living on the Ordoñez plot. Next to the abandoned Llora mausoleum, a family of four had pitched their makeshift tent. As more squatters crept in, to whom the administrators of the Cementerio de Manila turned a blind eye, a village of sorts arose, keeping watch over the stones of the dead, sweeping fallen leaves from their graves and removing flowers that had wilted and browned in the tropical sun. Thus they styled themselves caretakers of the graves, inspiring even greater tolerance for their presence among those in charge, such that far from brusquely restricting their movements, the guards at the gate greeted them by name and allowed them free access and egress without much resistance. The crypt of the Romulo family even hosted a sari-sari store for the cemetery’s living inhabitants, and some cunning member of the community had taken the key to the public restroom for safekeeping at the store, under the watchful eye of a gray-haired woman affectionately known as Tandang Cora—a joke entirely lost on foreign visitors who, in any case, were few.

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