Public Republic

Zdravka Evtimova

Photo: megyarsh
Shon didn’t have enough money. All his friends had forgotten him. He couldn’t pay his sex tax and that meant that he could no longer be a man. He’d be processed into a stone, and he knew he’d be deaf and blind dust. Each particle of the dust he would turn into would [...]

Shae Davidson

Photo: Joi
“There was a river in Ohio that caught fire,” Gordon said as he poured sugar into his coffee. “Near Cleveland, I think. So many chemicals dumped in year after year—one day it just went.”
Gordon was a reliable source for obscure information whether useful, disturbing, or just puzzling. His family had moved here [...]

Julia Spirirdonova

Photo:pinksherbet
Life sucks. If someone tries to tell you otherwise, don’t buy it. One has to be a complete idiot to be an optimist.
I feel like dying when they tell me “Your life is yet to begin.” Couldn’t they come up with something better?
Hellooo, not my life is yet to begin; my [...]

Erin Chandler

Photo: CarbonNYC
Samantha told me my heart had been broken three times. Samantha’s the psychic medium I talked to the other day. I know everybody thinks ‘yeah, yeah’ but she was good and she was right. My heart has been broken three times. All three times felt pretty much the same… lost, lonely, devastated, like [...]

Shae Davidson
Photo: nicholas_t/
“There was a river in Ohio that caught fire,” Gordon said as he poured sugar into his coffee. “Near Cleveland, I think. So many chemicals dumped in year after year—one day it just went.”
Gordon was a reliable source for obscure information whether useful, disturbing, or just puzzling. His family [...]

Erin Chandler

Photo: Hamed Saber
“I’ve been where you’re hanging, I think I can see how you’re penned; when you are not feeling holy your loneliness says that you’ve sinned…” Leonard Cohen
It was Anton I was most worried about. Not how I was going to get back to North Carolina, where I was going to live, [...]

Rose McCann

Photo: Lidia Tagnesi
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It’s early Saturday morning, the Halloween party ended hours ago, and before his overnight guests begin to stir from their drug- and alcohol-induced sleep, William de Vere discovers a letter that the landlady has slid under his door in the middle of the night. With growing alarm he reads the letter several [...]

By Petar Marchev
Translation from Bulgarian:Asya Draganova

Photo:dspender
Petar Marchev’s “War and Peace” won second place in Public-Republic’s competition for prose.
Kolyo is a road man. Kolyo is short – sighted. Kolyo loves kalvados*.
Kolyo goes hunting wild pigs. But kills a man.
The guy had a 6-year old son. When Kolyo walks past the house of the killed [...]

Jason F. McDaniel

Photo: tourist_on_earth
I want to be dead. I am not thinking about divorce or mothers crying to God as their sons are taken away or the two guys in my company who were killed driving down a thousand year old street. I am thinking about my life and all the life that surrounds me [...]

Jason Williams

Photo: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
In the plastic cup-holder between Paul and his wife, the cell phone shudders awake. Abby flips aside the church bulletin and plucks the phone from the center console. The glowing, smudged screen reflects in her glasses. “Says it’s Chris. From work?”
God damn it, he thinks. Sunday morning. [...]

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer’s interview with Susan Piver

Susan Piver is a writer, teacher, and speaker on topics such as love, creativity, and spirituality. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Hard Questions: 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say “I Do” and the award-winning How Not to Be Afraid of Your Own Life, [...]

Barry George

Brian Russell’s Meeting Dad is a memoir of his efforts to reconcile with his natural father. The story unfolds with a sense of urgency and anticipation. Russell is a fourteen-year-old living in Buffalo; Bob Jaycox is a salesman now living in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with his second wife and family. [...]

Interview with Brian Russell by Andrew Micheli

Brian Russell is the author of Meeting Dad: A Memoir, which is being released April 1, 2010 from Accents Publishing, Lexington, Kentucky. After more than twenty years of working in the theater as a director and producer of plays, musicals, and operas, Brian shifted his focus toward writing. He [...]

Whitney Groves

Photo: aturkus
“Things will be different when Tequila’s baby gets here.” For the last eight months, Amber had reminded herself of this fact whenever she was bored or worried or upset. She soothed herself by itemizing the baby’s parts as she imagined them: big blue eyes, specks of fingernails, first gummy smile, the powdery [...]

Elayne Clift

Photo: Tony the Misfit (taking a break)
Although my mother and father went directly to Philadelphia and Toronto, respectively, when they arrived at Ellis Island at the beginning of the 20th century, I have always imagined them living for a time on Hester Street, that teaming gateway to a new country that would bring them [...]

Joan Donaldson

Photo: RonAlmog
From the foam
I pulled myself from Lake Michigan and peeled away my selkie skin. Waves tugged at my lengthening ankles. My new toes dug into the wet sand, weathered bits of quartz and feldspar. The last rays of the angled sun mingled silver and apricot across the ripples, as I rolled my gray [...]

Roger Conner Jr.

Photo: banoootah_qtr
James and Anita lay on the bed, flat on their back with not a stitch of clothes on. This was first time they had done this in years, maybe since college. It was a cool night for July so the air conditioner was off and a soft breeze moved ever so slightly [...]

R. L. Burns
The elevator opened on the twelfth floor and Rose hurried out of it, glad to escape its confines as well as its emptiness. Elevators made her sad now – especially hotel elevators. She still couldn’t believe that he was not coming.  She had made this reservation some time ago – ha! It seemed like a [...]

R. L. Burns

Photo: Flowery *L*u*z*a*
She felt him before she saw him.  Even with the wind howling around the corner of the building, her hair in her eyes, the hem of her black velvet skirt flapping against her calves, she felt him.  She had no idea from which direction he would come, but instinctively she looked [...]

An interview with the swedish writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri by Desislava Velichkova
You were in Bulgaria just a year ago. Tell me about Sofia. Tell me your own opinion about the city!
Unfortunately, I was in Sofia for too short a time to get to know it. Hopefully we will become friends next time.
What about your phone [...]