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Bloomsbury | 781639738564 | 256 pages | June 23, 2026 It’s 6:30 am in New York City, and Agnes is filled with lip injector and toxic optimism for her day. She’s a SoulCycle devotee, an ideal girlfriend for her novelist partner Nathan, and a writer for an “anti-fashion” magazine called Whorl, a superior version of W. Over the course of twenty-four hours, her internal monologue never stops, and her goal is simple enough: Agnes wants someone to kill her. Like a feminist After H

Carl knows Tim is gone when his skin takes on the texture and color of a terracotta planter. He knows the shade well, having spent the last several days wandering through the living room, stopping at the display case with pieces of Tim’s parents and grandparents, shards of their skin mounted like butterflies pinned into a specimen box. When Carl sets his hand on his husband’s chest, it feels hollow, not just still, as though he is one of those hundreds—maybe it was thousand

I was four months pregnant, and we were already broken up when he started planning our future again. The muscle memory came easily—pretending the wound wasn’t still bleeding beneath the floorboards. We spoke in futures, borrowed intimacy like proof we hadn’t imagined it all. He would FaceTime me late at night, tilting the screen as if he were offering himself carefully, hoping I would take him whole. “I didn’t want to spoil the surprise,” he said, his voice light with antici

You might’ve seen my domain from an airplane window. Miles and miles of rocky, empty, firework-colored desert, and somewhere at the center of it all, the little white glint of a lone building. That’s where we live. My older brother, my grandad, and me – King of Infinite Space. You probably wouldn’t think anything about it. I’ve been on a plane once too, for my parents’ funeral. My brother let me have the window seat on the way back, so I know there are all sorts of strange sh

I wore only new shoes that summer. He asked to walk with me. My heels sank into mud. We took the woodsy path to the cliffside bar where the older teenagers kissed. The gossips told my mother this. I didn't catch his name. I hardly looked at his face. He was traveling up and down the boot to festivals of the saints. A pellegrino. In my mother's childhood, they walked barefoot for their penance, prayed at the church. He wore grown men's shoes and zippered pants. He walked

My boyfriend left for a week, but he hasn’t been back in a month. He keeps texting me, “Just a few more days, babe.” His name is Gary, but his SoundCloud rapper name is G-Dirty money. We met in college, senior year, and he owned a rusty red truck. This was upstate New York, where everyone owned a rusty red truck. Gary fit in. It snowed all the time that year. We used to smoke cigarettes in the rusty red truck bed, snow everywhere, letting ourselves get buried together.

Eleanor Polak's "The Dinner Party" appears in the Spring 2026 Issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? My favorite punctuation mark is the m dash (—). I think it’s one of the most emotionally expressive punctuation marks. A literary hot take I have is that, regardless of the recent movie version, Wuthering Heights’ Catherine and Heathcliff have very little romantic chemistry. What inspired you to write “The Dinner Party

"Flu Season" by Ella Torres appears in the Spring 2026 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What’s your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? As a huge fan of Emily Dickinson (and a poet), I love using em dashes! I feel like, when they’re properly used, they can really help emphasize sentences. My hot take is that "good writing" doesn't require inaccessibility. Too often, literary prestige gets confused with difficulty, but I think the true mission of writing is to

Erin Williamson's short story "Litany" appears in the Spring 2026 Issue of Broad Ripple Review. What’s your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? Oh! The exclamation point, for sure! It can be overused and should not (!) be co-mingled with CAPITALIZATION to dictate public policy!!!!! But! Exclamation points still make me giddy. It’s the best punctuation for a sports bar, or when you need to yell "I love you," across a crowded train platform. I don’t know if

Gillian Gurley's "Grief is a Quilt" can be found in the Spring 2026 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What’s your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? I am a maximalist. I love a semicolon because it can be my co-conspirator in packing more clauses into a sentence. My hot take is that it's fine to set aside prize-list books and bestsellers in favor of recommendations from people you love and trust. My closest friends are all big readers, and when one of them pre

Travis D. Roberson's "On Berlin, Lucia" can be found in the Spring 2026 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What’s your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? It's funny, after I read the past issue of BRR, I combed through the author interviews and noticed the em dash as a consistent answer. The contrarian in me wishes I could be someone to break up the consensus, but it's hard not to take the side of something so perfectly versatile and refined. I used to hate the

I want to light your cigarette. You, the woman who shares her surname with a city romanticized by the likes of Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed. Berlin . Wunderbar. I want to light your cigarette even though I've always been deeply allergic to something in cigarettes. Smoking never worked out for me, which knocked off a few cool points in the punk rock circles I ran in. Kids used to pop Vicodin. I popped Zyrtec. While on the subject of punk, let's note your fascination with the

Before I leave my house, I make sure my winter jacket is packed with the essentials: wet wipes, hand sanitizer, propolis throat spray, an N95 mask, disinfectant spray, and my "transit glove" that I use to open doors, press buttons, and move through the city. It's not craziness. It's flu season. I spray the elevator with disinfectant before entering—only when nobody is there, of course, I'm polite—and I don't share elevators, at least not by choice. When someone steps in while

All morning spent flat, still on the bedroom floor. The seam between the wooden planks is wide enough for a fingernail to clear grime and splinters. Noon chirps, then out to the mailbox. The truck picks its way down the road and rattles to a stop. The mailman stiff-arms a stack of envelopes out the window. Siobhan reaches forward. Carefully, she rehearsed this part for hours, peering at the ceiling. The words come fast. It is difficult to remove Walter’s name from some accou

By the time I had learned that I was going to have a child, my cat had grown to an enormous size. When she stood on her hind legs, which was something she did now, she was the height and width of a dinghy. Her ears would brush against my ceiling and come away grey with dust. I had never realized that I needed to dust my ceiling, and now I had a way to do so. When I learned that I was going to have a child, my cat sat me down on the living room sofa. At first, she curled up in

In response to loss we get busy making meaning, recreating what we have lost and reanimating forms of life that might otherwise disappear. This seems to me a wondrous response to love and loss, a wondrous response to caring and finitude in general - Jonathan Lear My father died under the walnut trees, in a year when there were no walnuts. The prior year, there were many: green globes tucked under their canopies of serrated, pinnate leaves. I collected them before they fell,

Ani King's " Deer Run " appeared in the Winter 2026 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? My favorite punctuation is actually no punctuation or wrong punctuation for the effect. I just love seeing what disregarding the rules can do to bring another layer to the narrative, how it can affect pacing, of course, but also what it does for the personality of the story, how it can be an element of characterization on its ow

Alfred Luarca's " Red Commas " appears in the Winter 2026 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? Favorite punctuation: The semicolon. It’s a pause with backbone; part stop, part breath, part insistence. It refuses closure and holds two truths at once: this mattered; we continue. Hot take: Sometimes the push for “relatable” stories can make books feel the same. I’m more interested in fiction that surprises me and chang

Kristine Langley Mahler's " A Plate, a Name, a Pile of Dirt" can be found in the Winter 2026 issue of Br oad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? I’m an inveterate ALL CAPS user—that might not be official punctuation, but it’s my favorite by far, and is connected to my hot take, which is MORE ALL CAPS PLEASE! What inspired you to write “A Plate, a Name, a Pile of Dirt”? I began this piece a handful of years ago as I was rearran

Zary Fekete's " The Things I Do Not Throw Away " can be found in the Winter 2026 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? My favorite punctuation are the ellipsis. I use them all the time for trailing, unfinished thoughts...or pauses :) My literary hot take: We learn early to crave stories that arrive with railings and exits, narratives that promise the dark will be brief and the meaning will announce itself on schedul