Issue 9, Fall 2015 features new work from Adam Klein, Andrei Babikov (translated by Michael Gluck), Chin-Sun Lee, Courtney Moreno, Diane Payne, Evan Hansen, Harry McEwan, Jen Schalliol, Jessica Murray, Joe Baumann, Morgan Christie, Roger Mensink, Satoshi Iwai, Scott Beal, Simon Perchik, Thea Swanson, Theodore Worozbyt, and Wilfredo Pascual. Cover art by D-L Alvarez. Your Impossible Voice is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit literary project dedicated to advancing literary arts by supporting writers and poets, encouraging readership, and promoting academic literary scholarship. We publish brash and velvety new work from around the globe, as well as literary reviews, essays, and interviews.

Your Impossible Voice #2 features new work from New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow Thaddeus Rutkowski, multiple Best American Poetry contributor Arielle Greenberg, MacArthur Fellow and Berlin Prize winner Han Ong, Bay Area favorites Lewis Buzbee and Mary Burger, and 2013 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award winner Will Alexander. Issue #2 also includes work from a diverse group of other talented writers, both established and emerging: Shruti Swamy, Josey Foo, Laurie Blauner, Rich Ives, Elena Botts, Darren C. Demaree, Mark Jackley, Janice Worthen, S.D. Lishan, and Katy Masuga. Cover art by Abeer Hoque.

Our summer 2016 issue brings brash and velvety new work from Laura Legge, Timothy DeLizza, Emile DeWeaver, Elena V. Molina, Michelle Lewis, Steve Davenport, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, and more.

Art was my dearest friend. To draw was trouble and safety, adventure and freedom. In that four-cornered kingdom of paper, I lived as I pleased. This is the story of a girl and her sketchbook. In language that is fresh, visceral, and deeply moving—and illustrations that are irreverent and gorgeous—here is a memoir that will change the way you think about art, sex, politics, and survival in our times. From a young age, Molly Crabapple had the eye of an artist and the spirit of a radical. After a restless childhood on New York's Long Island, she left America to see Europe and the Near East, a young artist plunging into unfamiliar cultures, notebook always in hand, drawing what she observed. Returning to New York City after 9/11 to study art, she posed nude for sketch artists and sketchy photographers, danced burlesque, and modeled for the world famous Suicide Girls. Frustrated with the academy and the conventional art world, she eventually landed a post as house artist at Simon Hammerstein's legendary nightclub The Box, the epicenter of decadent Manhattan nightlife before the financial crisis of 2008. There she had a ringside seat for the pitched battle between the bankers of Wall Street and the entertainers who walked among them—a scandalous, drug-fueled circus of mutual exploitation that she captured in her tart and knowing illustrations. Then, after the crash, a wave of protest movements—from student demonstrations in London to Occupy Wall Street in her own backyard—led Molly to turn her talents to a new form of witness journalism, reporting from places such as Guantanamo, Syria, Rikers Island, and the labor camps of Abu Dhabi. Using both words and artwork to shed light on the darker corners of American empire, she has swiftly become one of the most original and galvanizing voices on the cultural stage. Now, with the same blend of honesty, fierce insight, and indelible imagery that is her signature, Molly offers her own story: an unforgettable memoir of artistic exploration, political awakening, and personal transformation.

Bending Reality is the innovative process used by billionaires, tech leaders, and the world's most successful people to make the impossible . . . probable. Victoria Song teaches readers how to unlock the hidden power within their bodies to get what they want. After achieving success but lacking fulfillment as a student at Yale University and Harvard Business School, and then as a Forbes 30 Under 30 Venture Capitalist, Victoria set off on an unusual quest to study, train, and work with more than 24 of the best coaches, therapists, and healers in the world. She then deployed the skills and tools she'd learned with a diverse group of the world's highest performers. Through it all, she's discovered the codes that enable her clients to bend reality toward the directions they want. By accessing this extraordinary ability, Victoria's clients have sold a company for 4 billion dollars, grown revenue 1,000% during a pandemic, and pivoted to design a more effective COVID-19 vaccine. Victoria reveals the meta-framework behind peak performance, self-development, therapy, and meditation that is accessible for all. Whether you've studied these areas closely or this is the first book you've read on this topic, you'll have a front row seat to how the world's elite use this knowledge to achieve more while doing less. In this fast-paced guide to success, you will learn how to: Bend reality by mastering two states of being that most people aren't even aware of. Navigate change and face the unknown like the greatest leaders. Access creative downloads that artists, musicians, and geniuses receive. Make your own luck--there's literally a recipe! Find your unique "zone of genius" and live from it every day. Packed with powerful tools and exercises, Bending Reality will move you beyond intellectual understanding to embodiment. This is not another mindset book. You're ready for Bending Reality if you realize it's time to go beyond the mind and harness the full capacity of your consciousness to make quantum leaps in every area of your life. After learning how to bend reality, you will no longer need to memorize rules, tips, or tricks, but you will embody the essence of a remarkable leader who can make the impossible--probable.

Winner of a 2017 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, this moving manifesto “empowers women to access a fearlessness that will enable community progress” (Essence). Through one incredible woman’s journey from a small Zimbabwe village to becoming one of the world’s most recognizable voices in women’s empowerment and education, this book “can help any woman achieve her full potential” (Kirkus Reviews). Before Tererai Trent landed on Oprah’s stage as her “favorite guest of all time,” she was a woman with a forgotten dream. As a young girl in a cattle-herding village in Zimbabwe, she dreamed of receiving an education but instead was married young and by eighteen, without a high school graduation, she was already a mother of three. Tererai encountered a visiting American woman who assured her that anything was possible, reawakening her sacred dream. Tererai planted her dreams deep in the earth and prayed they would grow. They did, and now not only has she earned her PhD but she has also built schools for girls in Zimbabwe, with funding from Oprah. The Awakened Woman: A Guide for Remembering & Igniting Your Sacred Dreams is her accessible, intimate, and evocative guide that teaches nine essential lessons to encourage all women to reexamine their dreams and uncover the power hidden within them—power that can recreate our world for the better. Tererai points out that there is a massive, untapped, global resource in women who have, for one reason or another, set aside their wisdom, their skills, and their dreams in order to take care of the personal business of their lives. Not only is this a type of invisible suffering experienced by countless women, this rich resource is a secret weapon for improving our world. Women have the capacity to inspire, to create, to transform—and Tererai’s call to action “shines as a beacon of hope to women everywhere” (Danica McKellar, actress and New York Times bestselling author).

The acclaimed journalist’s New York Times–bestselling essay collection: “hilarious, nimble, and thoroughly illuminating” (Colson Whitehead, author of The Underground Railroad). In this highly anticipated debut collection, Brian Phillips demonstrates why he’s one of the most iconoclastic journalists of the digital age, beloved for his ambitious, off-kilter, meticulously reported essays that read like novels. The eight essays assembled here—five from Phillips’s Grantland and MTV days, and three new pieces—go beyond simply chronicling some of the modern world’s most uncanny, unbelievable, and spectacular oddities. They explore the interconnectedness of the globalized world, the consequences of history, the power of myth, and the ways people attempt to find meaning. Phillips searches for tigers in India, and uncovers a multigenerational mystery involving an oil tycoon and his niece turned stepdaughter turned wife in the Oklahoma town where he grew up. Dogged and self-aware, Phillips is an exhilarating guide to the confusion and wonder of the world today. If John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead was the last great collection of New Journalism from the print era, Impossible Owls is the first of the digital age.

Twelve-year-old William Eng, a Chinese-American, has lived at Seattle's Sacred Heart Orphanage since his mother disappeared five years ago. During a trip to the movie theatre, William glimpses an actress on the silver screen who goes by the name of Willow Frost. Struck by her features, William is convinced that the movie star is his mother.

“Enchanting . . . the most surprising, confounding, and oddly insightful couple’s trip in recent literary history.” —Entertainment Weekly The prize-winning, bestselling author of Gingerbread; Boy, Snow, Bird; and What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours returns with a vivid and inventive new novel about a couple forever changed by an unusual train voyage. When Otto and Xavier Shin declare their love, an aunt gifts them a trip on a sleeper train to mark their new commitment—and to get them out of her house. Setting off with their pet mongoose, Otto and Xavier arrive at their sleepy local train station, but quickly deduce that The Lucky Day is no ordinary locomotive. Their trip on this former tea-smuggling train has been curated beyond their wildest imaginations, complete with mysterious and welcoming touches, like ingredients for their favorite breakfast. They seem to be the only people on board, until Otto discovers a secretive woman who issues a surprising message. As further clues and questions pile up, and the trip upends everything they thought they knew, Otto and Xavier begin to see connections to their own pasts, connections that now bind them together. A spellbinding tale from a star author, Peaces is about what it means to be seen by another person—whether it’s your lover or a stranger on a train—and what happens when things you thought were firmly in the past turn out to be right beside you.

A witty, urbane, and sometimes shocking debut novel, set in a hallowed New York museum, in which a co-worker's disappearance and a mysterious map change a life forever Stella Krakus, a curator at Manhattan's renowned Central Museum of Art, is having the roughest week in approximately ever. Her soon-to-be ex-husband (the perfectly awful Whit Ghiscolmbe) is stalking her, a workplace romance with "a fascinating, hyper-rational narcissist" is in freefall, and a beloved colleague, Paul, has gone missing. Strange things are afoot: CeMArt's current exhibit is sponsored by a Belgian multinational that wants to take over the world's water supply, she unwittingly stars in a viral video that's making the rounds, and her mother--the imperious, impossibly glamorous Caro--wants to have lunch. It's almost more than she can overanalyze. But the appearance of a mysterious map, depicting a 19th-century utopian settlement, sends Stella--a dogged expert in American graphics and fluidomanie (don't ask)--on an all-consuming research mission. As she teases out the links between a haunting poem, several unusual novels, a counterfeiting scheme, and one of the museum's colorful early benefactors, she discovers the unbearable secret that Paul's been keeping, and charts a course out of the chaos of her own life. Pulsing with neurotic humor and dagger-sharp prose, Impossible Views of the World is a dazzling debut novel about how to make it through your early thirties with your brain and heart intact.