Cartoon Caption Contest – Grump the Conqueror $500

Cartoon Caption Contest - Grump the Conqueror $500. In honor of our second year under Grump the Conqueror, Eckleburg is running a caption contest featuring you know who and his newest favorite conquest. We thought about going with an Epstein theme, but the cartoon just got way too creepy.
The Editors

Couples

"These portraits have a secondary meaning: when the male is spliced together with the female—a representation bi-sexual being is created. The composite Couples image represents the male and female qualities in all of us."
Bobby Neel Adams
Bobby Neel Adams was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina and presently resides in Arizona on the Mexico Border. Adams has exhibited worldwide and his photographs are in the permanent collections of: International Center for Photography, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Station Museum, diRosa Foundation, and the Norton Family Foundation to name a few. Adams has received grants and awards from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, LEF Foundation, MacDowell Art Colony and the Hermitage. His book Broken Wings was published by the Greenville Museum in 1997. Adams is currently working on a series of Memento Mori photographs of insects, birds, and mammals. He is the Eckleburg No. 22 featured artist. Read more at bobbyneeladams.com.

THE WITCH by Marie NDiaye

The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump (Vintage Books/Penguin Random House) opens with a mother's musings on the apathies her daughters wield, dismissing their inherited powers generationally passed from mothers to daughters:  "When my daughters turned twelve I initiated them into the mysterious powers. Mysterious not so much in that they didn’t know those …
Rae Cline on FacebookRae Cline on InstagramRae Cline on Twitter
Rae Cline
Rae Cline is the author of the short story collection The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals (Patasola Press, NY). Her debut novel is forthcoming from 7.13 Books in spring 2026. Her stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in print and online at The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, McSweeney’s, DIAGRAM, North American Review, Gargoyle and more. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have won prizes, scholarships and fellowships from Johns Hopkins, American University, Aspen Writers Foundation and North American Review. She earned an M.A. in Writing at Hopkins and received her M.F.A. in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction from American University, where she was the recipient of the Starr and Sartwell scholarships. She has lectured on campuses and other venues including Hopkins, American University, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, St. Mary’s College of Maryland and others. Rae splits time between NYC and the Gulf of Mexico with her husband Rand and Havanese puppy Sophi. She is the founding editor of Eckleburg and is represented by Jennifer Carlson with Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency. Read more at raecline.com.

Blackbird Baby

The mechanism by which you reveal yourself—by which you are revealed—it’s blood and bone, it’s black feathers and red ribbon. L Ann Dulin You have been living in the cornfield since summer started. No one has noticed you, no one has shooed you out, you have dug yourself a pit to sleep in in the …
L Ann Dulin on Instagram
L Ann Dulin
L Ann Dulin writes mid-western gothic and magic realism. She is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing program and an alum of the Yale Writer’s Workshop. She lives in Baltimore with her family, where she helps secure space science operations for NASA in her spare time.

I’m thinking of Burnt Things

The third time Chir (officially) leaves me, I run up and down Mama Ngina street until I can’t breathe. But even then, despite everything, I can’t imagine going back to our—my—apartment without him, so I stumble into Prestige Bookshop to pass the time. I walk around the bookstore, picking up and putting back books whose …
Clarie Gor on Twitter
Clarie Gor
Clarie Gor is a Kenyan writer and editor. Her writing has been published in Catapult, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Audacity, Shenandoah among others. All her work is archived on clariesramblings.com.