THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE A funny thing happened on the way to Greece: I kept getting hijacked to India. When I’m researching a subject, I begin by talking to as many people as I can and pulling every halfway-relevant book off the library shelf. I also read The New York Times every morning and tear out […]
Nonfiction
Who Made That Wooden Horse, and What’s It Doing on Our Beach? What Greece Needs Now
The Soul of Brevity by Lee Upton
Don’t worry. Everything will make sense. Just not our kind of sense with our kind of senses. The pyramids were built on sand and that is why they last. Petunias, the exuberant and yet sad flower: Judy Garland without show business. The sea is not impressed by anything. Even if the sea crawls past us […]
Reserved for the Son by Bryan Paiement
I experienced my first and only peep show when I was thirteen. My father, Pierre, was coaching a junior level hockey team in a tournament in Montreal, Quebec, where he grew up. I wasn’t old enough to play, so I tagged along as the team’s “stick boy.” Fifteen hours north of our hometown of Roanoke, […]
The Stranger by Joanna L. Grisham
The dogs barked non-stop for at least twenty minutes. We couldn’t see them, but we knew they were standing at the bottom of our long, snaking driveway. We heard their nervous howls and yaps, beckoning someone—Daddy—to seek them out, to find out what was the matter. “What the hell is their goddamn problem?” Daddy peered […]
Yellow Cake by Rebecca Cook
When I’m small enough to still wear white tights and lacy white panties with my navy blue sailor dress, we go to the funeral home in Ringgold. I walk into a crowd of people talking in hushed voices, looking into a box. I’m too short to see what’s in the box and I know better […]
The King of Sixth Street by Bobby Neel Adams
In 1981 my business partner Ira and I moved into a studio that our friend Cindy was sub-letting; we became sub-sub-letters. The two-story concrete box was covered in scrawl and located on the corner of Sixth Street and Tehama Alley, in the South of Market District of San Francisco. Our cavernous studio had a ceiling […]
Like the Wine of Our Red Alaska by Amy Holwerda
The first night we meet outside the classroom, you say you like two things: whisky and music. You hustle me into the car, slide a disc into the player, and roll the windows up against the storm. You say we should pretend that we don’t know each other, pretend that you don’t even know my […]
NOTES TOWARD A GENREFICATION OF LITERARY FICTION by Claire Harlan Orsi
The romantic strain—the idea that individuals emanate unique works of art unconstrained by societal or intellectual strictures—is as potent as ever in contemporary thinking and teaching about writing. Nowhere is this more evident than in the relationship of literary fiction to genre fiction, a category that literary writers tend to deplore. Take a few sample […]
32, BLUE by Michael Barach
32 Blue . . . In the backyard I say hike, drop two steps back, and wait with my elbow cocked and the youth football our father bought us for Hanukkah grazing my ear. In school I held a conch shell that echoed ocean sounds in its spiral corridor, and in the football I listen […]
SOUL MAN: LIFE IN RUSSIA,THEN AND NOW by David Kirby with photography by Barbara Hamby
YOU HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR EXCEPT, WELL, EVERYTHING “Don’t go to Russia,” said chef, author, and TV personality Anthony Bourdain during a May visit to my hometown. Bourdain had already confessed to eating sheep testicles in Morocco and a raw seal eyeball during an Inuit seal hunt as well as an unwashed warthog rectum in […]
