The Missouri Review

On January 24^th, The Missouri Review will launch textBOX: an anthology of exceptional fiction, essays and poetry published in The Missouri Review since 1978. This free, online anthology is designed to provide open access to a selection of some of the best short fiction, nonfiction and poetry for students and teachers of creative writing and contemporary literature.

On the way home with Ivy from the diagnosis, he could hardly drive. At a busy intersection, he dribbled forward onto the path of a double-decker turning laboriously to his right and got the car wedged in the bend between the cab and the body of the bus. The double-decker kept moving. The car, oddly snagged on it, swung sideways. The passenger side tilted up. An envelope skittered the length of the dashboard and fell into his lap. He clutched the steering wheel and raised himself an inch from the seat. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ivy clinging to the passenger-side door to keep from sliding into him. She looked terrified. There were shouts. The bus squealed to a halt. Traffic was knotted around them, and exhaust poured in through the window. People were looking at the car curiously, as if it were a clever dog about to perform a circus trick.

The bus driver was apoplectic. A spray of spittle descended on the car. Mr. Ninan imagined him coming down from his perch in a murderous rage, tire iron in hand. Instead, he ground into first gear and lashed the bus forward, as if to flip the car over and kill them both. Ivy lost her hold and fell heavily against his shoulder.

“Ivy: A Love Story” by Mathew Chacko was originally published in the Summer 2008 issue of TMR and will soon appear in its entirety on textBOX, the new online anthology from The Missouri Review.

On January 24^th, The Missouri Review will launch textBOX: an anthology of exceptional fiction, essays and poetry published in The Missouri Review since 1978. This free, online anthology is designed to provide open access to a selection of some of the best short fiction, nonfiction and poetry for students and teachers of creative writing and contemporary literature.

Here is an excerpt from one textBOX selection, the short story “Motherland” by Min Jin Lee.

The children invited to Solomon’s party were the sons and daughter of diplomats, bankers and other wealthy expatriates. Everyone spoke English rather than Japanese. Moses had chosen this prestigious international school in Tokyo because he liked Americans. He had specific ambitions for his son: Solomon should speak perfect English as well as perfect Japanese; he should grow up with other young upper-class people; and, ultimately, he should work for an American company in Tokyo or preferably in New York, a city Moses had never been to but imagined as a place where everyone was given a fair shot. He used to say half jokingly that his son would be an “international man of the world.”

A line of black limousines snaked along the street. As the children left, they stopped Moses and Etsuko to thank them for the fine dinner they’d eaten. Neither Moses nor Etsuko spoke very good English, so they nodded and smiled. Moses lined up the children in front of the restaurant. He ordered, “Ladies first,” a saying he had picked up from American movies. The girls trooped into the cars in sixes and sped away. Then the boys followed. Solomon rode in the last car with his friends, Nigel, the son of an English banker, and Mohandas, the son of an Indian ambassador.

“Motherland” by Min Jin Lee was originally published in the Spring 2002 issue of TMR and will soon appear in its entirety on textBOX, the new online anthology from The Missouri Review.

On January 24^th, The Missouri Review will launch textBOX: an anthology of exceptional fiction, essays and poetry published in The Missouri Review since 1978. This free, online anthology is designed to provide open access to a selection of some of the best short fiction, nonfiction and poetry for students and teachers of creative writing and contemporary literature.

From the short story “Loeka Discovered” by Seth Fried

There was something spellbinding about it, peering down the vast well of time at Loeka’s small, puckered face. While extracting a tissue sample for analysis, it wasn’t uncommon for any one of us to sing to Loeka sweetly or to talk to him as if he were an obedient child. Something about it softened us. Whereas before we would march down the sterile, artificially lit halls of the Institute, nodding to one another as we passed, the air around us a cold flutter of clipboards and clicking pens, we now began to stop and greet one another, laughing. Two weeks with Loeka, and some of the men started showing up to the lab in more brightly colored shirts and gag neckties. Some of the women traded their slacks for skirts that ended just below the knee, traded their sensible loafers for something with a heel; their vibrant, exciting clacks echoed down the corridors, which, once gray and subdued, now seemed charged with untold possibility.

Every day there were more newspapers and magazines clamoring for interviews about Loeka. We tried to be as calm and plainspoken as possible, but the fervor of the moment quickly overtook us. We delivered our interviews breathlessly to an unending bank of microphones. Yes, his leather boots were being developed commercially. Yes, they were surprisingly comfortable. No, his ax was made of copper. Yes! Yes! We gave the reporters large, toothy grins and finished one another’s sentences. We winked wryly at one another when a question was broad or obvious. When leaving the interviews, we took one another by the arm, walking back to our posts with a sense of privilege, a kind of giddiness.

“Loeka Discovered” by Seth Fried was originally published in the Winter 2008 issue of TMR and will soon appear in its entirety on textBOX, the new online anthology from The Missouri Review.

On January 24^th, The Missouri Review will launch textBOX: an anthology of exceptional fiction, essays and poetry published in The Missouri Review since 1978. This free, online anthology is designed to provide open access to a selection of some of the best short fiction, nonfiction and poetry for students and teachers of creative writing and contemporary literature.

From the short story “Kind” by L. E. Miller

 “Tell me your secret. How do you stay so slim?” Edith asked Ann whenever she saw her, giving Ann’s waist a squeeze. “As you can see, my interest is strictly anthropological.”

Or she’d press a worn paperback edition of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams or Ibsen’s A Doll’s House into Ann’s hands. “You must read this. It will change your life,” she’d say.

Ann had never met anyone with so little vanity. Edith’s hems drooped; her heavy-framed reading glasses slid down toward the tip of her nose as she rushed through the hallway, her tread heavy in the boxy leather sandals she wore all year. Her curls, threaded with gray, defied all attempts to rein them in. Every few weeks she came around, collecting for one local family or another that was facing misfortune or for “our Negro brothers and sisters in the South.” Each cause seemed so urgent, Ann always dropped some money in the jar. She really had none to spare, and the petty economies she had to practice for days afterward left her resentful and ashamed of her ungenerous heart.

 “Kind” by L. E. Miller was originally published in the Winter 2007 issue of TMR and will soon appear in its entirety on textBOX, the new online anthology from The Missouri Review. “Kind” won the O. Henry Prize in 2009.

On January 24^th, The Missouri Review will launch textBOX: an anthology of exceptional fiction, essays and poetry published in The Missouri Review since 1978. This free, online anthology is designed to provide open access to a selection of some of the best short fiction, nonfiction and poetry for students and teachers of creative writing and contemporary literature.

From the short story “Drowned Edward Tug” by Mary Bucci Bush

Edward Tug was nobody special to Step Hall, especially now that he was a dead man. Step waited on shore while Fred Titus and Elmo pulled the body onto the grass and laid him next to the half-submerged boat they’d found drifting among the cypress stumps that morning. Edward Tug himself had washed into the cypress cove and come to rest against a broken branch dragging in the water. Two fat ducks had paddled noiselessly around the body, diving now and then for bottom grass, then flicking their tails sharply before bobbing upright. They were still paddling near the farthest stumps, undisturbed by the men.

Step nudged the toe of his shoe against what remained of the boat. It was made of old waterlogged pieces of road timber strapped to a mule watering trough, the whole thing not much bigger than a coffin. Any fool would have known with just one look that the thing would never stay afloat.

But Edward Tug was worse than a fool. He was in love. Or had been, as of last night when he was still a living man. Now he was no better than the rotting hunks of soggy timber dragged up on shore. The only difference was that Tug would be put into a dry box and planted several feet deep in the ground, whereas the old boat would be left where it lay to break apart and sink into the mud and eventually support a growth of quack grass, bramble, and locust bush, thus returning to the earth at a somewhat different rate than the man who had built it.

“Drowned Edward Tug” by Mary Bucci Bush was originally published in the Fall 2001 issue of TMR and will soon appear in its entirety on textBOX, the new online anthology from The Missouri Review.