Tag Archives: American

Like Homer, Ovid, and Dante, Patricia Storace, in her new novel The Book of Heaven, has produced a great harmonizing of myths into a single cosmic tale. Unlike these forbears, her ear is attuned to the myths outside our hearing—the ones neglected by the bards, inscribed in constellations beyond our horizon. For Epiphany today, our […]

I had waited for my absent master for twenty years and when he returned he came in the guise of a beggar, a mangy tramp, a bag of bones. This was calculation, this deception, the final triumphant wile of the wily Ulysses. I alone recognized him. I thumped my tail in joy though I hadn’t […]

Kate Bernheimer, whose story “Goodnight” we feature in Little Star Weekly this week, has more going on than can possibly be expressed in one tiny author’s note. First of all, her anthology, xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, is due out in a month. It is a follow-up to her widely admired previous anthology My Mother […]

Now the streetlights came on. It wouldn’t be dark for a while yet, though the sky already felt like it was filled with coming darkness. Miss Vicks had gotten up from the bench and was preparing to cross the overwide section of road between the lot and the holly bush at the foot of the […]

Let me try this out, he thought, pulling into the driveway with its bottom-scraping incline, the one Dana always said would eventually force her to get out of the car and walk, as she piled on the pounds as an old lady. I’ll try this out: I instinctively know I’m sick, I suspect I’m dying, […]

God created everything in a rage. He had never wanted more than what he had: airy space and his own kind of play. He’d come from an old family and was the only boy. Everything there was was his, and he spent his days, before the world was there to bug him, changing into different […]