New fiction on Guernica

When the heat comes I have to get out. I live on the top floor of a tenement walk-up, a flat filled to clutter with the detritus of a lifetime in New York City, my belongings packed so tight they seem to sweat and absorb all that’s breathable from the still air and deprive me of oxygen when I try to sleep. Such is the heat wave untempered by air conditioning. I haven’t slept in nights.

Geoff Kirsch’s hilarious, biting, and frankly bizarre Join the Club is up.

Tall and reedy with a penchant for red knit caps, this Holden Caulfield—as she insisted everyone call her—was a refreshing change from my other female coworkers, who were either built like cast-iron floor safes or fierce enough to gnaw the locks off one. She’d swing by and we’d talk, and not just Hey, how’s it going? Leftover muffins in Conference Room A, but actual conversation, you know, why bad things happen to good people, the search for permanence in a throwaway society, music. So the day she told me of a sudden vacancy in the book club she belonged to, of course I said I’d love to.

Grasping the fallen man by the back of the neck, the sergeant dealt him a series of rapid-fire slashes across the face with his whip, and then dragged him to the edge of the flooded pit. He let go of him and stepped back a pace. His face had regained its humanity.