The Empath

The stranger’s suffering called to her across a great stretch of wood and thicket. Its distance, its faintness should have made it easy to ignore, but instead it nagged at…

Magical Girl Eater

What research did you do for this story? Did you learn anything that surprised you? Angela Liu: I looked up new products/collaborations and remakes for series I loved in the…

Porcupine

In “Porcupine,”—from her new collection Baby in a Box—as in all of Sarah Braunstein’s writing, there’s a lifetime of wisdom distilled and compressed into her firecracker sentences. Susannah, the story’s…

Big Girl

Her stories contain both rage and humor in an effective if uneasy mix. As droll as it is tall, “Big Girl” applies journalism’s clueless prose to the hormonal horrors of…

The Tinder Box

“One spark. Two sparks. Three. This is what it takes to ignite a revolution.” A reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s original fairytale, “The Tinder Box” tells the story of a…