Fiction

Character entangled in circumstance. Revelations of language and self under pressure.

Lia Purpura, Wasp Nest (detail), featured in AGNI 102

Featured

Resin and Wood

Fiction by Monique Schwitter Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky

She finds herself attracted to strangers on a fairly regular basis. Lots of men have something about them that makes her nose stand to attention....

Amber

Fiction by Miha Mazzini Translated from the Slovene by Gregor Timothy Čeh

She is making me a birthday cake and doesn’t yet know that she’ll probably throw it at me. In about fifty minutes’ time, perhaps an hour, our marriage will be over. She smiles fleetingly, more sensing than looking at me...

Sea State

Fiction by Niall McArdle

“Let’s take to the high seas,” he says. “We’ll float for a bit and see where we land.” He bangs his fist on the hull. “Big, right? Like I said. She can take a beating.” The galley stinks of sour milk...

Abscission

Fiction by Anna Badkhen

And now Delia can’t find the potholders. Not on the hook by the oven, not on the kitchen island, not in the drawer where they keep their kitchen towels. She opens the cabinet above the sink, then the one next to it...

Mister Nowakowski

Fiction by Max Kruger-Dull

I write my name on the whiteboard in bubble letters, my teaching name: Mr. N. Only adults can form Nowakowski, I’ve learned. I smile at my third graders like a puppet they know. Like Elmo maybe. Like Cookie Monster...

Serial

Fiction by Jenny Heijun Wills

My new boyfriend said he was gonna fuck up my old boyfriend because he makes me cry and then tricks me into forgiving him, again and again and again. He was kind of sexy when he said it, my new boyfriend, because I’m not...

Portfolio

Futures: A Portfolio of Work in Translation

The translator widens the writer’s craft toward the timeless. You the reader, in a distant place they only imagined, activate their words. John Berger writes, “Time was death’s agent and one of life’s constituents. But the timeless—that which death could not destroy—was another. All cyclic views of time held these constituents together: the wheel turning and the ground on which it turned.” We invite you to “Futures”—the circuits of that ever-turning wheel on moving ground, and part of our human duty to imagine ourselves beyond ourselves.

I am thirty-one years old and hot as a biscuit. That’s what I said during my interview here when asked why I felt qualified to work as the Kisstress at the Holy Angels Carnival Kissing Booth. I think they liked my verve.

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