new fiction 2025

An Excerpt from “Of Music and Men” by Jeff Nazzaro

NEW FICTION

Crowded. I move across the car and stand in the doorway. It’s the rear of the front end of a double car. Just before the train leaves the station, a tall, thin man hurries on and thumps down into the empty aisle seat by the door across from me. He looks up at me. Then he looks again. He keeps doing it. I take my book, an Alice Munro collection, out of my bag, open it to the next story, “Free Radicals.” Then I realize I’m standing in the doorway on the side of the train on which at each stop the doors will open, so I gather up my bag and slide across the aisle to stand in the opposite doorway. Two seconds later, the man who had repeatedly looked at me jumps up out of his seat and stands right beside me. 

He stands very close to me, looking straight ahead. But whatever. It’s a free train. I take my book out, open it back up. “Free Radicals,” here we go. As I read the opening lines, the man standing next to me takes out his phone and with it plays some hip-hop at top volume. I stand there. I’ll admit I had wanted to move when the man first jumped up and stood next to me, because there seemed to be no good reason for him to have done it, but I thought it wouldn’t be polite to move. I still have those thoughts sometimes, even after years of this commute. Now I know he’s fucking with me and has been ever since he hopped on the train just before the doors closed. Is it the jacket? The tie? I don’t know. My face?

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

“Tupac Shares Nachos, Tells a Fable in Denver Terminal TGI Friday’s” by Sarp Sozdinler

NEW FICTION!

(photo by Perry C. Riddle/LAT)

The terminal was too bright for that hour of the morning, fluorescent lights pulsing in sync with the hum of a thousand tired travelers who hadn’t learned how to sleep upright. Tupac, sitting at the counter of TGI Friday’s like he owned the joint, looked out of place in the best way. A neon green cap on his head, a hoodie that said The Future is Ours in cracked white print, and a plate of nachos that seemed too perfect, too symmetrical for such a place.

I was just getting off a plane that was delayed for two hours, staring at my phone like it would tell me some kind of truth. I could hear Tupac’s voice, low, as if he was talking to himself. I didn’t know if he was even supposed to be there, but there he was. He was eating the nachos, passing them around to the three strangers sitting next to him, and then he was telling a story. Something about wolves.

I looked around to figure out if I was the only person seeing this. No one was laughing.

“You see,” Tupac said, handing the last tortilla chip to a guy in a business suit, “a wolf doesn’t fear the night. It understands that the darkness isn’t an enemy, it’s the space where life belongs.”

I wasn’t sure if he was talking about his life or life in general or just trying to make sense of something else. Maybe he was just sharing, like he always did, even when he wasn’t singing. The people around him were laughing now, like they finally got it. Or at least that they wanted to. A woman in a red scarf nodded, her fingers tracing the rim of her coffee cup, like maybe she was going to say something too. But she didn’t.

Tupac took a breath, almost like he was deciding whether to keep going. “See, what I’m trying to say is, you don’t run from things just because they’re scary. You run toward them, Martha. Even when you’re hungry. Even when they’ve already eaten you.”

I didn’t get the analogy. But maybe I wasn’t supposed to. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten nachos at 4 a.m. in an airport, or why it felt like I had. Or why Tupac was here, talking about wolves and nachos, as if it all made sense. But it did, somehow. That was the thing. It made more sense than anything else. At 4 a.m. Inside the Concourse B of the Denver International Airport.

The waitress came by, filling my coffee cup without asking, and Tupac, now sitting back, eyes closed like he was just waiting for the next flight to land, smiled. 

“You lost?” he asked, stealing a nacho from the hand of a man in three-piece suit.

I didn’t know what to say. I watched the steam curl from my coffee like it might spell something out on my behalf.

“Yeah, no,” I finally muttered, then gave a half-shrug. “I’m just going home.”

Tupac nodded, as if he had heard enough. “That’s what all we do, man. We all have places to be.”

And then the terminal felt quieter. Like the night had finally caught up with the lights.

Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Vestal Review, Fractured Lit, HAD, Hobart, JMWW, Trampset, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected or nominated for such anthologies as the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He is currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.

An Excerpt from “The Museum of Jeremy’s Summer” by Andrea Donderi

NEW FICTION

Christabel is fairly sure she’s the wrong person for this particular job. They’ve hired her too early in the game to put her expertise to best use, and she’s a beginner at the kind of trustee-wrangling and civic politics that are currently underway. But thanks to common sense, an unusual accent, some acting experience, and decent clothes, she’s getting by. The trustees have abandoned the hare-brained idea of locating the museum up here at the house; they’re working out a deal with the people restoring a big old brick building in the middle of the city. People appear to be taking her seriously.

“You’ll be fine,” her mentor Peg in San Francisco had told her. “Mostly they need an authority to quote, so they can feel okay about their decisions. And face it, you need the dough, and you could use a summer away.”

All true enough. Adrian had just abandoned a book of his own, was going through what he gruffly called a “rough patch,” and had lately been leaking equanimity-threatening volumes of vitriol. A stretch apart might give them both a chance to catch their breath.

(Troubling that Peg had noticed, though. Had it been so obvious? Christabel hadn’t said a word.)

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

An Excerpt from “Fame and Fortune” by Alan Swyer

NEW FICTION

Despite the lingering sense that he’d been conned, duped, or sold a bill of goods – the exact term depended on his feelings at a given moment – Jeff found himself not merely adjusting to Southern California life, but actually enjoying it. Having lucked into an apartment a block and-a-half from the beach in a still somewhat funky part of Venice, he loved the climate, which allowed him to run or bike at dawn on Ocean Front walk without encountering sleet, hail, or  horrendous humidity. He got a kick out of being in a place that had more yoga teachers than Mumbai, as well as ubiquitous Pilates studios, gyms big and small, and even a place called  Stretchlab. And he marveled at the restaurants catering to diets unheard of on his home turf. Though he had encountered vegetarian before, he hadn’t been aware of Ethiopian vegetarian, or  multiple examples of paleo, keto, gluten-free, Atkins, plus something called Zone. 

As for the infamous LA traffic, it only became a bother when, in a used Camry that made his cousin cringe, he had to make an emergency run to Children’s Hospital on the eastern edge  of Hollywood. 

In the low-rise Santa Monica office he shared with his cousin, the division of labor was clear. Steve treated the offspring of the “high-ranking industry folk,” while Jeff tended to the sons and daughters of what were termed “the civilians.” 

That, Jeff quickly came to realize, meant that he was spared the fawning, pandering, and  indulging that Steve felt provided the pathway to the success. 

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

An Excerpt from “The Ghost of Camp Hero” by Shelby Raebeck

NEW FICTION

Basketball basketball basketball. We sit in class all day thinking about it, then practice for two hours or maybe have a game, and drive home talking shit about who busted who, and I drop ’em both, Higgins and Sonny, in a fucking trailer park. And though my father’s life insurance got us a house—split level ranch in the center of Freetown—the place was too big for us to heat, half the rooms sealed closed with plastic. Every day same as the one before, until Coach comes up to me after practice and asks if everything’s okay and I say Sure, why wouldn’t it be? And he says, You’re not playing like yourself, keep it up and you won’t get a scholarship, and I shrug my shoulders, thinking, Fuck a scholarship, and take Higgins and Sonny home to the trailer park and go driving.

It’s another of those cold gray East End days when I pull up to the first beach, Maidstone, only half mile or so from home, and see this figure standing out at the end of the jetty that sticks into the harbor, wearing this purple hat and scarf. On days like that everything blurs into gray – water, land, sky—except now there’s these two soft spots of color. Then the figure holds its hands out to the side and turns slowly in a circle, and I realize it’s Joany. She spins again and I can barely make out her mouth is moving. I roll down my window but the wind is whipping in off the water too loud to hear anything, yet I see the headphones poking out beneath her hat and her mouth opening and closing like she’s singing. Hasn’t said a word to anybody in almost a year and she’s standing out there on the jetty singing.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!