Atticus Books

When we come across a writer and a work we think our readers might like to get a glimpse of, that’s just what we give them. This excerpt, taken from Burton Porter’s The Moebius Strip, offers a glimpse into the seemingly incomparable, yet oddly parallel lives of a French sensualist and a New England minister. [...]

July 22 This new house doesn’t smell anything like the slum. It’s a little crowded but I guess I’ll have to get used to it. In the Orphan-itch, I didn’t have to share my bed like I do tonight. That part’s really beat. They didn’t tell me it would be like this when they came [...]

In late September, this last fantasy somehow coincided with—either slightly prior to or after—my discovery of the boy, my little hazel-eyed errand-runner, hugging his knees on the front steps of my building. It was dusk and rush hour. Because of road construction somewhere in the tight city grid, every car with wheels was re-routed down [...]

In April 2010, writer and blogger J.M. Tohline embarked on a creative experiment. Tohline’s website, a self-described forum for “thoughts on literature, life, and being awesome” displayed a new kind of post that reached out to his online community of readers. It read: “This is a story called ‘The Storyteller.’ We’re all writing this story [...]

Some states in America have legalized physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill. Imagine that a mysterious entrepreneur took advantage of this to establish a chain of suicide parlors, where dying patients could have the “Passing of their Choice.” There would be spiritual Passings with bells and gongs, convivial Passings with wine and song, erotic Passings [...]

Judy’s blue Honda could barely do the speed limit when it was going up a hill, and Pittsburgh was like a small, misshapen mountain. She down-shifted to second, then up to third, then accelerated onto the Parkway. The traffic was a disaster. She had to be at work at nine. It was 8:56. She didn’t [...]