In today’s newsletter, a new short story, and then:

• New bite-sized fiction
• A review of a Booker longlist pick
• The irony and ecstasy of Colson Whitehead

Birdie is eight years old. Her parents are away in another state, visiting some old friends, fellow-Mennonites they volunteered with in Africa, and Birdie has been left with her aunts and her grandmother. She moves from room to room, exploring or watching her aunts cook or work in the garden, trying to make sense of the world around her. She wants to be an astronaut or a ballerina, wants to live in a city and go to art museums every day. Instead of putting down roots, the way the rest of the family has, Birdie, true to her name, hopes to grow wings and soar. One night, her aunt Miriam tells her a story about the Devil and a typewriter, and, ultimately, about the potential price of trying to choose one’s own destiny. Birdie wakes up the next morning feverish and changed. It is, as Yoder, the author of the novel “Nightbitch,” says in the accompanying Q. & A., the end of an era for Birdie, and perhaps the beginning of a new one.

— Deborah Treisman, fiction editor

Photograph by Balarama Heller

“When the angel came to Craig, he was seven, squatting in the outhouse at camp.” Read “One and No One,” by Gabriel Winslow-Yost. It’s the latest installment of our Flash Fiction series, featuring very short stories posted weekly during the summer.

Each week, our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about books. See the list »

P.S. Valeria Luiselli’s highly anticipated “Beginning Middle End,” a book about a mother-daughter trip to Sicily, was published this week. An excerpt from it appeared in The New Yorker.