A straightforward list of my works currently appearing in print or online. In the event that a work is for whatever reason deplatformed, the link will go dark. As-is, I have a few stories I’ll get around to putting on here later that are no longer publicly available. For the most part though? Just stuff you can read, today, that I’ve written. Enjoy!
- “Nolo” published in Artifex Magazine vol. 7
- Alright, this one’s a bit of a cheat…as of 6-9-2021, vol. 6 is up on the website…I am sure 7 will be along shortly. I put together a lot of different vignettes, but mostly it’s drawn from my own time as a juvenile delinquent.
- “The Air was Fresh, and Sweet” in GNU Journal
- Part of a sort of / kind of series I was working on with ambiguously gendered protagonists…mostly stories of loss and longing, and learning to deal with emotions. Like many of my stories, it is not cheerful, nor is it thematically crystal-clear.
- “Say August” in THAT Literary Review #4
- You’ll have to buy this one to read it – 100% inspired by Neko Case’s “Star Witness.” Sometimes I just slip completely into another person, or in this case, a pair of people, becoming them so completely that I must tell their story. Or, as I said at the time of its composition: Something has been scratching the back of my brain trying to get out, and it’s starting to emerge. I listened to Neko Case’s “Star Witness” as I heated up some leftovers on the stove and watched the rain. I heard the nascent cry of a new narrative in the strings and in the water. It’s here
- “After Homecoming” in Blunderbuss Magazine
- I would describe my relationship with police & policing as “complicated”, and I think it’s easier for me, and also more useful for the reader, to extrapolate dark-future scenarios where I can sort of color things in sharper relief. I do believe there’s a role for state-sponsored enforcement of law…but not like this, which to my mind is a pretty logical extrapolation of the way things are going.
- “The Purse” in Superstition Review
- I have a whole SERIES of works set in a fictionalized small town in Southwest Michigan. That town has its own geography, its own history…hell, even its own Rotary. However, it mostly all swirls around the events of 1979 in which one man shoots his friend, and everything sort of flows into and out of that. This is the story of the man who gets shot before he gets shot. BONUS: “Nolo,” above, is the story of that man’s son raised by the shooter! Layers, I tell you – layers.
Defunct / Offline / No Longer Available or In Print
- “Hands” in Danse Macabre and The South End
- My first published Four Pines story – technically my first publication ever, and twice at that: this story appeared in Wayne State University’s student paper The South End at the request of it’s editor, and then I cleaned it up and published it again three years later after my MFA in Danse Macabre.
- “15 Shekels, 1000 Agurot” in Danse Macabre
- Published in the apparently now-defunct November 3rd Club, it’s not a story I’m particularly thrilled about – a young tourist survives a suicide bombing, but I think overall it’s sort of clumsy and stumbles into political territory that I’m not sure I really have or had any right to comment upon.
- “Trees of Heaven” in HERO Magazine
- Sometimes a tight deadline can give you exactly the kick in the pants you need. I had about a week to bust out a two-page short story on the topic of Detroit beginning with the phrase “Dear Detroit.” While I don’t know if it’s necessarily brag-worthy, my piece appeared first in the short collection, and more to the point, appeared internationally. Pretty snazzy IMHO.
Vytautas Malesh 