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Joe Baumann's "Leave in Death with Ease and Plenty" appears in the Summer 2026 Issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? Oh, I love a well-used semi-colon. I used to be a big em-dash fan, but as my style changed over time (as I think many writers' styles do), I left it behind. And of course, now there's all the humbug with AI-generated garbage overusing them, so semi-colon it is. My literary hot take, which may not actu

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

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

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

Yvette Naden's " Confessing to Mrs. Dalloway Through a Bathroom Door " appears in the Winter 2026 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? Favorite Punctuation: Parentheses because when used, it's as if the text takes on a life of its own, as if the narrative is interrupting itself to reveal a sense of uncertainty or vulnerability. I like the idea that even the book knows it's holding something back and wants to correct

L.B . Browne is the winner of the 2025 Broad Ripple Review Prize in Fiction. Her story, " The Dress Department " appears in the Fall 2025 issue of Broad Ripple Review What's your favorite punctuation? The em dash. Real thought isn’t linear and doesn’t arrive whole, and the em dash is honest enough to capture that. No other mark so boldly and elegantly barges in, interrupts language, changes direction midstream, and then steers a sentence back on track. A literary hot take

Dorit d'Scarlett's story " Green Jumper " appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? Brackets — though I rarely use them, I want to use them more. I love the way they create a secret chamber inside a sentence, a kind of afterthought or whisper that runs parallel to the main thought. Hot take: novels don’t need neat resolutions. Ambiguity is closer to how life is actually lived. A present moment,

Sofía Carbonell Realme's essay " Pearls in the Kitchen" appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What's your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? I love the em dash. It’s so— breathlessly—expressive, don’t you think? It also reminds me of Emily Dickinson. Literary hot take: the 18 th century is a skip. What led you to submit “Pearls in the Kitchen” to a literary magazine versus a more academic one? You know, I’ve never thought of thi

Margaret Dunn's story "Little Eden" appears in the Fall 2025 issue of Broad Ripple Review. What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? Diehard fan of the em dash. "The Rules of Attraction" is Bret Easton Ellis’s best work, and it’s one of the best campus novels ever written. What led you to write “Little Eden”? I’ve always been interested in girlhood and ‘loss of innocence’ stories. Adolescence is the first time girls experience intimacy outside of th

Angela Townsend is the winner of the 2025 Broad Ripple Review Prize in Nonfiction. Her story, " Write Until You Pray " appears in the Fall 2025 issue of Broad Ripple Review . What's your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have? I will never outgrow the innocence of the exclamation point! It is life bubbling over, all earnest and unguarded. It keeps company with daisies and comets. It is the first kid in the cafeteria to admit to loving something uncool. It is a