Fiction
Somebody’s Got to Sweep the Floors
By Craig GarrettI’d gotten in a habit of going to Wal-mart at 4AM to play the demos of video game systems I couldn’t afford. They had a King Kong game set-up for a while that I thought was pretty slick, where you got be Kong and run around beating up on dinosaurs. I figured they’d be taking it down before long, so I was putting in my time, playing the same level over and over.
Born Man
By Lisa GunnYesterday was a big day for me. Yes, yesterday was quite a big day. You see, yesterday my mother gave birth to 185 pounds of my sagging middle-aged flesh.
from Miransù
by Monica Sarsini, translated from the Italian by Maryann De JulioI would have liked to have a male child. Everybody’s happy with a male. When your mama had your brother she bent over backwards, after when she had you she was happy, there was already a male, your father when he saw you the first thing that he said was, tell me the truth, they forgive you, I love you the same, did you go with an Indian? You had two very dark eyes… Your mother aborted a bunch of times poor thing, though two times I aborted, me too.
Two Extracts from Aline and Valcour
by the Marquis de Sade, translated from the French by Jocelyne Geneviève Barque and John Galbraith SimmonsNo surprise that Sade would defend what came to be known as homosexuality but his reasoned defense of it is unusual for its rejection of nurture or upbringing as its cause in favor of what would within a couple of centuries be largely acknowledged as owing to inborn biological or constitutional features. From the character known as Sarmiento, a thoroughly unpleasant Portuguese adventurer who has gone native in Africa, a hundred years before Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
