KYIV UNEDITED

The air high above is all dark. But blinding light takes hold over the boxing ring below. Wooden chairs crowd in around the roped-off square. White faces rise up in…

‘“Here’s the money. Don’t wander off. And be sure you aren’t short-changed… for the love of Job.” ‘The Ferret, still a boy of less than 12, and dressed as one…

The eyelids withdraw to disclose two sea-blue pools, each with a tiny pupil adrift, struggling in the morning light to enlarge, focus in on and transmit to John Smith’s mechanical…

The lamp burns yellow. And a patch of soft light warms the shadows below it, as these would otherwise devour the kitchen tabletop on which the lamp stands, holding to…

Exactly 27 years ago to this day, in a ninth-grade English composition class at the Brooklyn School of Scientists, the following essay was submitted in completion of a routine writing…

The curtains are drawn to reveal a tangle of soiled and sodden bedding that is Dirk Dickerson’s funeral pyre. The Half Guinea stands at the opening of a sterile white…

Note: The following 10 pieces were salvaged from a garbage can in the offices of Kyiv Unedited during the operation to collect, retrieve, and permanently preserve “The Kyiv Commix” before…

There’s something rotten in Kyiv. And it’s not the carcass of one of the city’s countless stray dogs on some forgotten footpath. A far more dangerous creature has made its…

Oh, yes sir. But I was only saying – Never you mind what you was just saying, and you have got!, and I repeat, being incapable of being more emphatic,…

“O, you people, gather round heya! I say! Gather round, gather round! “That’s right, don’t be shy; Boss Lard ain’t gonna hypnotize you or put you unner his spell or…