We’re thrilled to introduce Sergio Muro, the new director of the Insider Prize, a contest for incarcerated writers in Texa...

I

In the restaurant’s fading light, he tells the story to his woman. Warily, the way his father told it to him:

There once lived a man named Elijah. A man who, among many other things—blacksmith, singer, lover of russet pears—had been born a slave. In those days, Texas had yet again changed its mind about what it was. It had belonged to Mexico, ...

The motel had only recently been converted. Converted is taking it too far. The new owner strapped a tarp over the motel sign, installed mini refrigerators in all the rooms, and began renting them out as efficiency apartments by the month.

Limited efficiencies, the ad said, because you couldn’t cook.

The tarp wasn’t secured properly, and when it was wind...

My boy Dr. Darren Wu is going through a divorce and we don’t know if he’s alright. He did buy a bow and arrow and a bullseye, but since his yard is short, he extends the range of his target practice by sliding open the back door and standing in the living room and shooting arrows through multiple rooms of the house at the target. Darren showed us a video of this, me and our o...

It was as though part of my breast had been cut out by a skilled anatomist and replaced by an equal part of immaterial suffering . . . And however neatly the wound may have been stitched together, one lives rather uncomfortably when regret for the loss of another person is substituted for one’s entrails.

—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time