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"  It&amp;#039;s always more thrilling to discover a new voice than to trot out an old, established one.  Open up the August 1958 issue of Esquire and you&amp;#039;ll find a story called &amp;quot;Heard Melodies Are Sweeter,&amp;quot; by a twenty-five-year-old, all but anonymous writer named Philip Roth. Thirteen years earlier, J.D. Salinger had published &amp;quot;This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise,&amp;quot; a story whose narrator fears his brother Holden Caulfield has died in the war \u2014 this was five years before Catcher in the Rye. Now jump to the early nineties, past some of the first stories ever published by Saul Bellow and Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson, to All the Pretty Horses, by a then largely obscure chronicler of the American West named Cormac McCarthy. And now come the Esquire Four. Whether any of these new writers will one day be mentioned in the same breath as Roth and Carver is anyone&amp;#039;s guess. But the power of their talent \u2014 the vitality and freshness of their voices \u2014 is unmistakable. Below are excerpts from each of The Esquire Four, available for purchase on Amazon, iTunes, Barnes and Noble, and Byliner. &amp;quot;Retreat From Moscow&amp;quot; BY Jennifer Dubois &amp;quot;After the attack,&amp;quot; Ben says, turning to the picture of himself with the tiger, &amp;quot;Annie was still up for anything.&amp;quot; The aim of the story is to show people that she was happy, in those last few hours, during that surreal reprieve between the attack and the subdural hematoma finally bursting. This is not the only lie, but it might be the most important one. &amp;quot;Hesca&amp;quot; BY M.C. Armstrong There was blood on the bib of her dress. Her dad, who was reading the newspaper, ran toward them. One minute he had a newspaper in his lap on the patio, the next he was kicking the dog in the ribs, and the dog was fighting back, growling and biting, up on its hind legs. It was the scariest thing Rochelle had ever seen, this sudden vision of her dad&amp;#039;s teeth, like he, too, was a dog, this sudden awareness that dogs could also get up on their legs. &amp;quot;Rape in the Animal Kingdom&amp;quot; BY Matt Sumell &amp;quot;\u2014 And the example I&amp;#039;m setting for him is that of alpha-male penguin swan hawk. If I do my job correctly, he&amp;#039;ll be capable of amazing sexual and regular-style violence on land, sea, air, ice, and telephone-pole power lines. I&amp;#039;m talking transgressive and cute. Identify and swoop. Seek and destroy.&amp;quot; And at that exact moment, little Gary hopped up onto my knee and moved his head around weirdly, kinda like an Egyptian, and sing-songed something like &amp;quot;purty, purty, purty... whoit, whoit, whoit, whoit... what cheer, what cheer... wheet, wheet, wheet, wheet!&amp;quot; All of us oohed and ahhed. &amp;quot;You Only Get Letters From Jail&amp;quot; BY Jodi Angel The Eberhardts&amp;#039; daughter disappeared the same week they started going to the movies every night to watch the 7:15 showing of The Exorcist, and it didn&amp;#039;t take long for word to get around that instead of sitting by the phone and waiting for her to call, they were sitting in the dark, watching that possessed girl slam some priests around her room. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a17097/the-esquire-four-new-fiction-writers-14813214/>