Atticus Books

The following excerpt is the raw beginnings of an unfinished manuscript called Fields of Golgotha. I’m not your typical assassin. I’m a stable family man. I have a loyal wife. (She’s never had an affair and I’ve only had a couple.) We’ve reared two maintenance-free, if not productive children. One, the boy, has a job [...]

Mary stops when she hears the crowd noise. Dead tunes and bebop blast out of car speakers. Vendors shout Hot dogs! Gooballs! Wheatgrass! Fair trade soy lattes! Beneath it all, a bassline of exercise instructors shouting encouragement–one two three four!–thumps like a marching band over a distant hill. She sneaks a shot of bourbon, stuffs [...]

How’s your brain?” Joe asks. The doctors fucked up the operation. All Jaws wanted was the tumor gone, but now he’s lacking short term memory as well. “All good on the northern front,” he says, tapping the side of his head. He gets the question every day and is running out of ways to pretend [...]

It was the summer of my twenty-first year. My girlfriend and I were making out in the basement of my parents’ house. I was still living at home and the basement apartment was where I slept, showered and pretended to be an independent bachelor. I had a private entrance off the driveway, and I often [...]

When I first met Richard, I knew he was a little different from the rest of our crowd. For one thing, he had a trust fund. It’s sort of like being on welfare, but you get paid a lot more. The way he acted, though, you never realized how much money he had because he [...]