Howard followed me out of Stuyvesant Park on a June night in 1995. Inside the park, in the shadows from streetlamps through trees, we had checked each other out, but hadn’t spoken. I turned left out of the tall iron gateway, walking north on Second Avenue, and Howard followed a few paces behind. When he […]
Nonfiction
Messages from Howard
The Blond Sheep
by Merrill Cole
Just having finished the back and biceps workout, I walk into the men’s locker room at Holmes Place on Hermannplatz. When I hear female voices gasping loudly, I leap towards the back and go through the door that leads to the pool and sauna areas. In the hallway in front of the pool, there are […]
From New York City to Mar Chiquita: Evocations of a Singular Friendship
by Consuelo Arias
“Now more than ever, my words conjure your silence” (dedication to John Anthes, from El libro de la muerte) In a text from Invitación al polvo, La nada de nuestros nunca cuerpos, Manuel Ramos Otero writes: “The elderly women of Mondoñedo bring ears of corn to the little Galician girl, over which falangist flies flutter, flies who never […]
Nichts passiert in München (Nothing Happens in Munich)
by Alicia Anderson
I tug my collar higher to shield my cheeks from the wind. Winter days bleed together, muddling over the edges of one to the next. There are flickers of joy, embers banked beyond commute and cubicle. There are days tinged by sorrow. We’re not meant to live in emotional extremes all of the time. Over […]
Cows and Wows: Why India Works Depite Itself and What We Can Learn from Its Example
by David Kirby (photos by Barbara Hamby)
PUT YOUR STAMP ON LILI When Barbara says she wants to go to India, the first thing I say is, “I’m not driving in that cockamamie country.” When it comes to driving in other countries, mine is a checkered history. I still don’t know what the traffic signs mean in France and Italy, and I’ve got […]
A Tour of Ancient Lykia (A Letter Sent to Albert Goldbarth)
by Vincent Czyz
13 September 2006 Dear Albert, A return to the art … or is it merely a craft? Of letter-writing. Certainly different from writing an e-mail, which is generally dashed off in a few minutes—a single sitting at most. But still different from the old days of pen and ink or even of the manual […]
Red Memory
by Christian Sorace
After his collection of over 200 Chairman Mao souvenir buttons was stolen a few weeks prior, on February 25th, 2012, 71 year-old Li Decai used a red belt to hang himself from a beam two meters high in a shed in his bean and carrot field.1 Li Decai became a local celebrity in the county-town […]
Four Letters
by Michael Karl (Ritchie)
Dear Petronius, I used to climb to where the Latin texts were shelved, on the top floor of a very tall building appropriately called Acres of Books. Shuttered in that stifling room, with dust baking in the light of a lone sealed window during a particularly humid summer day, I rummaged among the books to […]
A Quiet Fighter
by Greg Hlavaty
When our group arrived at the put-in to the Chattooga River, Cathy, our veteran guide, was first to exit the car and get us unloading the paddling gear. All of us were rookie staff at the Nantahala Outdoor Center (NOC), a major rafting company in western North Carolina, but my girlfriend Jenn and I were the […]
What I Don’t Know about My Mother
by Graham Guest
(1) I don’t know her real, legal name: her name at birth. Once, I thought it was Marion Bush, but that turned out to be wrong. Oddly, my dad doesn’t know, either. (2) I don’t know who her parents, grandparents, etc., were. (3) I don’t know if she had any siblings. (4) I don’t know exactly […]
