Recommended by The Literary Review



Issue No. 139







The story of the creation of my elephant vampire songs begins on the December morning when I killed Aisling, heroine of our last album and my fiancée, in one Porsche and fled Texas in another. The second car belonged to our manager, and stealing it was a snap, I just called down to the front desk. The valet even asked for my autograph. I signed the parking ticket and headed for I-35. Early in the tour my father, Ike Bright, Sr., had pretended to die in the tsunami in Japan; since then, he’d been hiding out near Texarkana. I guess he’d owed a lot of money. To hoard his address around America had made me feel more powerful than the people around me, whether or not their own fathers were alive. It’d had me singing “Barnacle” in a major scale so that our fans hopped to it instead of swaying. Now I drove nonstop through Dallas, Sulphur Springs, and then northeast toward the Palmetto Flats, following signs for a wildlife refuge. Just over the Red River I came to the mailbox that said Blackhawk, my father’s fake name.

Read the full story here!

About the Author





John McManus is the author of four books of fiction: Stop Breakin Down, Born on a Train, Bitter Milk, and his latest story collection, Fox Tooth Heart, forthcoming from Sarabande Books in November 2015. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, The Oxford American, The Literary Review, and Harvard Review, among other journals and anthologies. He is the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award, Creative Capital Literature grant, and a Fulbright Scholar grant. He grew up in East Tennessee and lives in Virginia, where he teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Old Dominion University.

About the Guest Editor



The Literary Review (TLR) is a quarterly of new writing from around the world that has been publishing out of Fairleigh Dickinson University since 1957. That makes it one of the oldest continually publishing literary magazines in the country. We pride ourselves on publishing stories, essays, and poems by new writers, making discoveries rather than chasing known quantities. The journal’s mission is simply to share writing we love with readers who love to read. The work we publish has the courage of its convictions—it is bold, unusual, risk-taking, and emotionally honest.





“Elephant Sanctuary” originally appeared in The Literary Review. © Copyright John McManus 2013. All rights reserved by the author.





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