Tag Archives: Fiction
A miracle from Anakana Schofield
—Mam. It had been years, and by the time the day came, she was ripe for it. Off the bus from college this Friday evening, home he was to her, stood in her kitchen, looking helpful—helpful was the way Jimmy looked. —Mam. I’ve something to tell ya. A silence brewed that she swiftly interrupted. It […]
Writers: Anakana Schofield
In the Dasgupta Institute, Tim Parks
Beth: People are fidgeting. Kristin has arrived to my left, Marcia to my right. Even without seeing, I feel who is there. I know them, I know the space. I know the vibrations they send, the way the air changes when they sit. Someone starts to breathe very deeply, rhythmically, behind us, some new student […]
Writers: Tim Parks
A Little Chess Table, new from Jerzy Pilch
It was a sweltering August in the year 1962. I was ten years old, and I was at the apogee of all possibilities. After some dozen months of incessant soccer playing, I had become a consummate forward. In a thick journal with a green binding, which I had received for my birthday, I was writing […]
Writers: Jerzy Pilch
A Self-portrait, by Karl O. Knausgaard
There is, in London, a painting that moves me as much every time I go and see it. It is a self-portrait painted by the late Rembrandt. His later paintings are usually characterized by an extreme coarseness of stroke, rendering everything subordinate to the expression of the moment, at once shining and sacred, and still […]
Writers: Karl Ove Knausgaard
In Memoriam: Margaret Weatherford
Los Angeles writer Margaret Weatherford died this week of cancer at the age of forty-six. She was a dedicated perfectionist and her output was tiny, but impeccable: funny, affectionate, intricate, and microscopically observant. She published a hilarious story in Zyzzyva, “East of the 5, South of the 10,” that mapped Greek mythology over the latitude […]
Writers: Margaret Weatherford
April Bernard: The Thoreaus at home
The family had refused to be impressed when Miss Fuller had left for Europe in 1846. All right that she had lived in New York and written for the reformist Tribune about the city slums; all right that she had traveled to the Great Lakes and deplored the mistreatment of the resettled Indians on their […]
Writers: April Bernard
Sergei Dovlatov
There’s a classic storyline that goes like this: a poor boy peeks through a chink in a wall on a nobleman’s estate. He sees the nobleman’s little boy riding a pony. From that moment on, his life is given over to one end—to get rich. He can no longer return to his former life. His […]
Writers: Sergei Dovlatov
Jeet Thayil, poet of the Bombay streets
He handed me the headphones. The music was high- pitched, like the sound track of a movie in which random scenes had been strung together, or cut up and played backwards, or deliberately placed out of order. Bottles clinked and a door creaked open. A shot rang out. A child whispered, is he here? Where […]
Writers: Jeet Thayil