The room is as dark as a crow.

A bright light appears, bathing a group of figures. They pose along a bench, their gazes fixed into empty space.

Pingmei Lan’s short story, “Cicadas and the Dead Chairman,” which appeared in Epiphany’s Fall/Winter 2018 issue, has been named a winner of the prestigious PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize.

That summer when Chairman Mao died I saw a funeral for the first time, a national one. It had gone on for weeks. Everywhere I turned people were wearing black armbands and making white paper flowers.

There's no better microcosm of America than an airport. There's no better album to listen to in an airport than this one. 

Some of the best novelists in the Americas and Europe have written about chess—yet one of the best chess novels, Chess Story (published in German as Schachnovelle; also known as The Royal Game) by Stefan Zweig, was written by an otherwise less than superlative author.

It will remind you why you struggle through winter after winter, why you wait underground for a train that may never come, why sometimes, despite living in the biggest city in America, you feel so alone.