Scott Hightower Tennessee Williams knew how to mine the kinetics of cruelty. Not the inverted and demure, “I’ll roll over, and let you ravish me, you he-man man, you!” Forget Stella. No. It’s Stanley, the shrieking infantile god, who’s vicious; who’s had enough of just “whistling Dixie;” who finally succumbs to being topped by Stella’s transvestite brother, who, in turn, has had enough of railroad Johns, and of...

Michael Tyrell The tuxed-up drunk, trembling the dorm’s lobby window when a bottle tipped him over. His squint not at me but past me to the one hundred keys glittering behind my post, the check-in desk, where all summer, I worked the Saturday insomnia shift. The ruse of looking down at the marble notebook, one-one thousand, then looking up: the drunk gone, like a movie ghost. The prank caller, the phone a bee-sting sound. The paper I...

Michael Tyrell I was born the summer of his disgrace. That’s always been my claim. And it’s a trait I despise in other people: hitching the intensely personal to the historical, making Watergate a lame pun for passage and delivery. But my mother insists on scandal. An unmarried mother, middle-aged— she swears her pregnancy didn’t show, even that morning she locked herself in the toilet and told her own mother to call...

Mara Michael Jebsen When I walk down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn where they sell African Black Soap and the Koran, it hooks me: the dark red leather, a dark like behind my eyelids when I close them. There’s a girl swinging a machete, cracking the coconut that lies against her palm. She’s out on the dusty streets of Lomé, laughing her loud rude laugh; I’m inside, learning to bear that smart, proud laughter that’s arsenal...