I listen to the clothes in falling circles, losing their weight. “What Is Gravity?” City Paper: First Prize, 1999 Short Fiction ContestĬolors make loops inside of loops. He could look at what he wanted, steer his father’s Navigator wherever, and never explain himself to anyone. He passed under a stone railroad trestle smoldering in red and yellow graffiti. In the city, Seth drifted along old streets freckled in brick and grooved with left-behind streetcar rails going nowhere. He took the Jones Falls Expressway, the river hurtling past. “I got a funeral to go to.” Buy Story for $2 “Elegance,” Saranac Review, Fall 2017 “I’m gonna have to leave early,” he said. He set a foil-wrapped pizza slice on the desk. The buttons on his pink Polo dress shirt were fastened to the neck. He was nineteen, tall, bean-thin, vigilant eyes, patchy beard. He came into class and slipped between a row of desks like he wasn’t hauling a load of grief. History,” The Doctor TJ Eckleburg Review, June 2016 Thirteen and adrift, I had none of his unflinching, intellectual mettle. My father, a lithe, blue-eyed mathematician, liked to tell how he once held his concentration for seventeen hours straight on a single math problem. You can be angry and not know it until much later. “Cedar Creek,” The Little Patuxent Review, Summer 2015 Both wore calf-high moccasins and look-alike fringy cut-offs. Vanka was pale–pale blond–her face a series of starved planes, though she ate everything. Amber was caramel, wore a tie-front blouse and combed up her hair in a platinum faux hawk. continue reading “Pretty Girls,” Mississippi Review, Finalist for the Mississippi Review Prize and published Summer 2015ĭusk and they sat on a lip of sill outside the store, eating tortilla chips, a pair of earbuds splitting Flo Rida between them. Pretty soon, graffiti cried through stairwells and across doors: Save Freedom House. No one talked anymore about the spent lights, or sometimey hot water, or the elevator-jamming hustlers. The minute they started talking about blowing us up, we forgot everything we didn’t like about Freedom House Projects. High rises, like towers made out of sidewalk. continue reading “The Rest of the World,” Winner of Philadelphia Stories Marguerite McGlinn Prize, Fall 2012 / Winner of Poets & Writers ’ 2012 WEX Award And in the tick, tick, tick, tick I saw all the mistakes I’d made: taking my problems out on people who had nothing to do with them, quitting in the eleventh when I could’ve finished because a lot of what I learned I still remember - like how copper and tin make bronze, or that book about Odysseus, who went through so much just to get home. Wollensky said slow, very slow, and now alone with Missy gone and the cold coming on, that’s what I did. Wollensky gave me a metronome to keep time. “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” december Magazine, Spring/Summer 2016 Nelson felt sick at the thought of other dudes elbowing in once he wasn’t around. Her ponytail was tucked over the snap back and Nelson saw she was looking cute again, not like earlier at Poo Bah’s when she’d been zapping out-pretending she wasn’t a county girl from a good county home-and eventually hurling his phone. She’d put on her Royal Caribbean ballcap from the cruise they’d taken to Jamaica last winter. “Ray Halliday’s Last Wild Days” Pop Shot Magazine, Fall 2020īraless, in a white tank, Hannah smelled of sweat and cigarettes and Vera Wang Embrace. Kick-off isn’t for another three hours, but drivers are still burning down my ass like they’ve missed something. The roads circling the mall confuse me even when I’m not high. A longtime public high school teacher, Schwartz writes with vivid grace about young men and women who yearn, love, betray and sometimes save themselves and one another.” Kathleen Wheaton, president of Washington Writers’ Publishing House “Game Day” J Journal, Fall 2021 “In Adam Schwartz’s stunning story collection, The Rest of the World, the city of Baltimore is the world: its harbor, its hot, crumbling asphalt, its summer-lush parks and takeout joints. Adam Schwartz’s debut collection of stories, The Rest of the World, won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House 2020 prize for fiction.
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