Watchlist (57 page)

Because, of course, there were no scientific or technological impediments against God, the clamoring supplicants turned to all sorts of magic. Charlatans and scammers proliferated, offering curses, charms, and talismans that would cloak the sinner from God's inspection. But such individual gestures failed to satisfy a populace growing more and more alarmed over surveillance by the Big Spook, that deific NSA in the sky.

At last the governments of the planet had no choice but to respond.

And so the construction of an orbital magic curtain around the entire globe began.

The project, still only partially finished after two decades, currently usurps half the combined GDP of all the world's economies. But the majority feel that fencing themselves off from God's view is well worth the bankrupting costs.

No one has yet raised the prospect that God is already inside the curtain, rather than outside it.

DAVID ABRAMS is the author of
Fobbit
(Grove/Atlantic, 2012), a comedy about the Iraq War, which
Publishers Weekly
called “an instant classic” and named a Top 10 Pick for Literary Fiction in fall 2012. It was also a
New York Times
Notable Book of 2012, an Indie Next pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, a Montana Honor Book, and a finalist for the
LA Times'
Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His essays, reviews, and short stories have appeared in
Esquire
,
Narrative
,
Salon
,
Salamander
,
Connecticut Review
,
The Greensboro Review
,
Consequence
,
Fire and Forget
(Da Capo Press, 2013),
Home of the Brave: Somewhere in the Sand
(Press 53), and many other publications. He lives in Butte, Montana, with his wife. His blog, The Quivering Pen, can be found at:
www.davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com.
Visit his website at:
www.davidabramsbooks.com
.

AIMEE BENDER is the author of five books; the most recent,
The Color Master
, was a
New York Times
Notable Book of 2013. Her short fiction has been published in
Granta
,
Harper's
,
The Paris Review
, and more, as well as heard on
This American Life
. She lives in Los Angeles, and teaches creative writing at USC.

CHANELLE BENZ's fiction has been published in
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014
,
Granta
,
The American Reader
,
Fence
, and others. Her work has also been selected as one of the Top Ten Longreads of 2012. She has an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University and a BFA in acting from Boston University. She teaches at the University of Houston.

SEAN BERNARD
is the author of two books, the story collection
Desert sonorous
(2015), which received the 2014 Juniper Prize, and the novel
Studies in the Hereafter
(2015).

T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE is the author of twenty-five books of fiction, including, most recently,
When the Killing's Done
(2011),
San Miguel
(2012),
T.C. Boyle Stories II
(2013), and
The Harder They Come
(2015). His next novel,
The Terranauts
, will be published by Ecco in 2016. Boyle's work has been translated into more than two dozen foreign languages, and his stories have appeared in most of the major American magazines, including
The New Yorker
,
Harper's
,
Esquire
,
The Atlantic Monthly
,
Playboy
,
The Paris Review
,
GQ
,
Antaeus
,
Granta
, and
McSweeney's
. He has been the recipient of a number of literary awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award for best novel of the year (
World's End
, 1988); the PEN/Malamud Prize in the short story (
T.C. Boyle Stories
, 1999); and the Prix Médicis Étranger for best foreign novel in France (
The Tortilla Curtain
, 1997). He currently lives near Santa Barbara with his wife and three children.

MARK CHIUSANO is the author of
Marine Park
, which received an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His stories and essays have appeared in
Guernica
,
Narrative Magazine
,
Harvard Review
,
The Atlantic
,
and
The Paris Review Daily
.
He writes for
Newsday
and was born and raised in Brooklyn.

ROBERT COOVER has published fourteen novels, three short story collections, and a collection of plays since
The Origin of the Brunists
received the William Faulkner Foundation First Novel Award in 1966. At Brown University, where he has taught for over thirty years, he established the International Writers Project, a program that provides an annual fellowship and safe haven to endangered international writers who face harassment, imprisonment, and suppression of their work in their home countries. In 1990–91, he launched the world's first hypertext fiction workshop; he was one of the founders in 1999 of the Electronic Literature Organization, and in 2002 created CaveWriting, the first writing workshop in immersive virtual reality. His most recent novel is
The Brunist Day of Wrath
.

LUCY CORIN is the author of the short story collections
One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses
(McSweeney
'
s Books) and
The Entire Predicament
(Tin House Books), and the novel
Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls
(FC2). She spent 2012–13 at the American Academy in Rome as the John Guare Fellow in Literature.

PAUL DI FILIPPO sold his first story in 1977, and since then has published over thirty books of short fiction, novels, and nonfiction, including
Ribofunk
and
The Steampunk Trilogy
(just reissued by Open Road Media). He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his partner of some forty years, Deborah Newton. He suspects he is being watched.

CORY DOCTOROW (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, and blogger—the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of the YA graphic novel
In Real Life
, the nonfiction business book
Information Doesn't Want to Be Free
,
and young adult novels like
Homeland
,
Pirate Cinema
, and
Little Brother
and novels for adults like
Rapture of the Nerds
and
Makers
. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and cofounded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

STEVEN HAYWARD is a novelist and short story writer born in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of the Canadian national bestseller
Don't Be Afraid
. A critical and commercial success,
Don't Be Afraid
was a Globe and Mail Best Book for 2012 and was also named one of the top ten novels of the year by Toronto's
Now Magazine
. His most recent book is a collection of short fiction,
To Dance the Beginning of the World
. He lives in Colorado and teaches creative writing at Colorado College.

BRYAN HURT is the author of
Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France
, winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. His work has appeared in
The American Reader
,
The Kenyon Review
, the
Los Angeles Review of Books
,
Recommended Reading
,
Tin House
,
TriQuarterly
, among many others. He teaches creative writing at St. Lawrence University.

MARK IRWIN's seventh collection of poetry,
Large White House Speaking
, appeared from New Issues in spring of 2013, and his
American Urn: New & Selected Poems
(1987–2014) will be published in 2015. Recognition for his work includes
Discovery
/
The Nation Award
, two Colorado Book Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, NEA, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He teaches in the PhD in Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California and he lives in Los Angeles and Colorado.

RANDA JARRAR's novel,
A Map of Home
, was published in half a dozen languages and won a Hopwood Award and an Arab-American Book Award and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by the
Barnes and Noble Review
. Her work has appeared in
The New York Times Magazine
,
Utne Reader
,
Salon
,
Guernica
, The Rumpus,
Oxford American
,
Ploughshares
,
Five Chapter
s, and others
.
She has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Hedgebrook, Caravansarai, and Eastern Frontier, and in 2010 was named one of the most gifted writers of Arab origin under the age of forty.

DANA JOHNSON is the author of
Elsewhere, California
and
Break Any Woman Down
, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her work has appeared in
Slake
,
Callaloo
, and
The Iowa Review
, among many others. Born and raised in and around Los Angeles, California, she is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California where she teaches literature and creative writing. She lives in downtown Los Angeles.

MIRACLE JONES is a Sagittarius. He is a very private person from Texas.

KATHERINE KARLIN's fiction has appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology,
New Stories from the South
, and journals including
One Story, TriQuarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, [PANK]
, and many others. Her 2011 collection,
Send Me Work
, was published by Northwestern University Press and won the Balcones Fiction Prize. She lives in Manhattan, Kansas, and teaches at Kansas State University.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, ETGAR KERET is a winner of the French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and the author, most recently, of the memoir
The Seven Good Years
. His work has appeared in
The New Yorker
,
The Paris Review
, and
The New York Times Magazine
, and on
This American Life
.

MILES KLEE is an editor for the web culture site the Daily Dot as well as author of
Ivyland
(OR Books, 2012) and the story collection
True False
(OR Books, 2015). His essays, reportage, fiction, and satire have appeared in
Vanity Fair
,
Lapham's Quarterly
,
The Awl
,
Guernica
,
The Collagist
, and elsewhere.

ALEXIS LANDAU studied at Vassar College and received an MFA from Emerson College and a PhD from the University of Southern California in English literature and creative writing. Her first novel,
The Empire of the Senses
, was published by Pantheon Books in the spring of 2015. She lives with her husband and two children in Los Angeles.

KEN LIU (
http://kenliu.name
) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
,
Asimov's
,
Analog
,
Clarkesworld
,
Lightspeed
, and
Strange Horizons
, among other places. He also translated the Hugo-winning novel,
The Three-Body Problem
, by Liu Cixin, which is the first translated novel to win that award. Ken's debut novel,
The Grace of Kings
, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, was published by Saga Press in April 2015. Saga also published a collection of his short stories,
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
, in March 2016. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

KELLY LUCE's story collection,
Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail
(A Strange Object), won the 2013
Foreword Review
's Editors Choice Prize in Fiction. Her work has appeared in
O: The Oprah Magazine
, the
Chicago Tribune
,
Salon
,
Crazyhorse
,
The Southern Review
, and other publications. Her debut novel,
Pull Me Under
, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2016. A Contributing Editor for Electric Literature, she hails from Illinois and lives in Santa Cruz, California.

CARMEN MARIA MACHADO is a fiction writer, critic, and essayist whose work has appeared in
The New Yorker
,
Granta
,
The Paris Review
,
AGNI
,
NPR
,
The American Reader
,
Los Angeles Review of Books
,
VICE
, and elsewhere. Her stories have been reprinted in several anthologies, including
Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy
2015 and
Year's Best Weird Fiction
. She has been the recipient of the Richard Yates Short Story Prize, a Millay Colony for the Arts residency, the CINTAS Foundation Fellowship in Creative Writing, and a Michener-Copernicus Fellowship, and nominated for a Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop, and lives in Philadelphia with her partner.