After a weak Trig sed maybee we shud call Gil Semmens, have him Eye-Ball James Elward. Ma laffd, Semmens? Trig shiftid in his chare, looking like he wishd he-ud kept his Mouth shut, but it was too layt for that, Ma full of scorn, was alreddy in his fayce—Had Gil Semmens nown how to saive…
Translated by John Cullen We were in Paradise: there was the fig tree and, over on the right, the apple tree, only half of which I could see through the big French window that opened onto the courtyard; there was moreover a cloud of birds so dense you could imagine it contained an infinite number…
Ace in the Hole The first Minuteman Missile—America’s first solid fuel, fully automated, push-button missile and John F. Kennedy’s secret weapon against the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis—was buried in Alpha Six silo, forty miles southeast of my hometown. It took only thirty-two seconds to launch. In 1962, when Khrushchev’s threats escalated, Air Command…
Translated by Lydia Davis When he starts telling stories, people gradually leave the table or turn away and talk about something else, and generally I’m the one who then has the bad luck to be obliged to listen to him. Someone must listen to him, after all, and he is a friendly man and a…
Translated by Lydia Davis Egon is no longer with us, we have buried him—we, a little band of people. Egon was my friend, and he was my reader. I knew him a long time and really from a distance, one of many in the bar, and he burdened people with tricky questions, he could really…
Deep, deep down in the southernmost part of South Texas sits the city of Brownsville. The landscape is home to countless ranches, endless dry brush, and thousands of recent migrants to the US from Mexico. Brownsville is seventy miles south of where the US Border Patrol operates one of its busiest traffic checkpoints, in Falfurrias,…
Peter Ho Davies, The Fortunes, a novel (September 2016, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Gail Mazur, Forbidden City (April 2016, University of Chicago Press). Alan Shapiro, Life Pig, poems (September 2016, University of Chicago Press). Alan Shapiro, That Self-forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration, essays (October 2016, University of Chicago Press). Gerald Stern, Divine Nothingness, poems (May 2016, Norton)….
Ann Beattie recommends Forty Martyrs by Philip F. Deaver: “These are grown-up stories about grown-ups. Subtly linked and beautifully written, their subject is loss (and possible redemption), played against a backdrop of Everywhere, America, that, in his hands, isn’t.” Robert Boswell recommends Calle Florista by Connie Voisine: “This is a remarkable book by one of…
It’s thought that when Cervantes embarked on Don Quixote, he intended to write a short novel. Henry James’ short stories had a way of growing into novellas and novels, a fate he fondly cursed. With Chekhov, it was the other way round: life was too short for the novel. (Though perhaps just long enough for…
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