(These are excerpts--click on the title to view the whole piece!)

Omiai Madness
 
The last time I talked to Tachiko, she'd just had her forty-fourth omiai and seemed remarkably blasé about the whole thing. "The last one was really cute," she sighed. "And he liked books, too." "Weren't you tempted not to turn him down?" She shook her head. "I figure if one of them really likes me, he'll call back." She shrugged. "Anyway, we always make them a pound cake. I'm really good at making pound cakes."  
 
Mary E. Whitsell

 

My Mother's Lost Loves
 
My mother dated many other men before she met my father, including the baseball player Tony Conigliaro (before he played for the Red Sox) and a boy from her high school named Ben with whom she had sex (she told me eventually) on a college vacation and then had a pregnancy scare and practically lost her mind with worry because she wasn't sure if Ben or Ivy was the father and she didn't want to tell either of them.  
 
Jessy Randall

 

The Emperor's Tailors
 
The evaluation of fiction writing has been hijacked by an ideology that defines literature in a way that has nothing to do with old-fashioned values like engaging characters, interesting plot or even simple entertainment. In fact, any writing that celebrates these elements is categorized as sub-literary or "genre." The result of this hijacking has been the canonization of a mediocrity lavishly praised for what anyone with common sense would regard as obscurity, wordiness and plain old-fashioned dullness.  
 
Thomas J. Hubschman

 

The World and I
 
Poland, a small country in Europe, sandwiched between her potent neighbors, forever occupied, cut, and divided, as if it were a piece of cake. Chopin's music in the willows--the constantly weeping, eternal sadness of freedom lost. Among all this, at the end of the 1950s, my father's study provides a safe haven, where I can sit under the desk, or find a book on one of the floor-to-ceiling black shelves holding many languages, countries, and religions in their wooden embrace.  
 
Monika Lange