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A Conversation With PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019 Author Kelsey Peterson
“I think, in pursuit of truth, science and religion still have to wrestle with the strictures of human knowledge, error, pride.”
PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019
ConjunctionsWest BranchMeridian
Conjunctions.
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Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician and Christian apologist born in 1623. He was very close with his younger sister, Jacqueline, born in 1625, a poet who became a nun. Both were considered prodigies.
Brother,
I saw a perfect circle today. The yellow disk at the center of an anemone bloomed early and whose white petals had curled back in the wind. I marveled at its humble perfection, springing forth from some superabundance of the unrelenting spring. I am curious if there is an equation for such a flower, the formula to project its arcs and angles, its radii and planes. But I think: What an excessive, joyful thing. Let us smell it and give glory to God.
Jacqueline,
Printed in the Gazette today there was a poem of some merit, and I wondered if you still write. To harness the imagination to your whimsy—it’s a dangerous, even dangerously useless gift, but you had have it.
Pensées
fiction
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A Roundtable With the PEN America Best Debut Short Stories Judges: Sabrina Orah Mark, Emily Nemens, and Deesha Philyaw
Many of the stories felt written on the edge of an edge of an edge of a world.
On “getting creatively lost”: Robert J. Dau Prize Winner Mathapelo Mofokeng
Learn about Mathapelo Mofokeng’s short story “The Strong-Strong Winds,” which was selected for ‘Best Debut Short Stories 2021.’
“The most innocent thing you can do is want to create”: Robert J. Dau Prize Winner Isaac Hughes Green
Learn about Isaac Hughes Green’s short story “The First Time I Said It,” which was selected for ‘Best Debut Short Stories 2021.’
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A Conversation With PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018 Author Lauren Friedlander
“I started thinking about immoral women, women who are not merely complicit counterparts to A Bad Man but active participants in cruelty.”
A Conversation With PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018 Author Megan Tucker
“The idea here is the casual way children can accept and parrot this kind of simple, black-and-white math about worth. So much so that in a pinch they are willing write off their own mother!”
A Conversation With PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019 Author JP Infante
“When you’re a kid you’re not sure if you don’t know something because you haven’t been taught it or because you’re not supposed to know.”