The crab apple tree had just fluttered its pink petals over the front lawn when Mary Dooley pulled up to the curb in the small U-Haul. I was on my balcony polishing my toenails—a deep red to contrast with my winter pallor. I paused, the tiny brush suspended over my baby toe, to watch as…
I got involved with Gregg Evans Langley through my friend Xandy, a young mime artist I had befriended when we were teaching at Chautauqua once. Xandy phoned to tell me he’d met a guy at a Chelsea opening who had a weekend place near me and he’d given him my number. The only details Xandy…
Bunsen burners click on, throats closed for a safe flame. The room tepefies—pipettes veiled in thin fog. Litmus paper drops like sleeves on a dress. Every girl measures: reds, blues, acid, acid, base. Some boys huddle around the fire, burn the edge of our assignment, laugh at how an eraser cooks in the blaze. I’m…
Many years before Zhao lost her right arm, she had used that arm to slap her husband, Yue, in a public denunciation in Wantu. Her hand had hurt after the slap, tingling at her side as she stood and watched Yue kneel in the dunce hat, so that even now when she remembered the incident,…
Scientists are a strange tribe. I was strange too, by the time of that long summer of 1995, but I wasn’t part of the tribe. A little over fifteen when my uncle brought me to the lab, I was too much trouble to be left alone, and the lab, less a means of keeping me…
From my stool behind the cash counter, I watch you through the window. Watch you double-park your Mercedes, turn the car off but leave the music system blasting hits from a time when your life was simpler: Anand, Mughal-e-Azam, Love in Simla. Cars swerve and honk, angry Queens drivers shoot curses as they whiz past….
One morning, I meet three Boers in the Pietersburg laundromat. It is a Saturday. I have half a load going—the full extent of my wardrobe—and I am reading a book called In the Heart of the Whore, a book about Boers, coincidentally. There are three of them, two guys and a girl—big primordial-looking people, red…
Neil Astley recommends Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist by Kirun Kapur: “Kirun Kapur has taken many years to produce a first collection which is so assured and lyrically compelling that it reads nothing like a debut volume. Her poems draw on family history, myth, and people’s stories to dramatize how the past informs the present, and…
Anthony Burgess called him “one of the great prose virtuosos of modern America.” Harper Lee lauded him as “the Evelyn Waugh of our time.” Kingsley Amis said he was “the funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic.” He wrote 27 books plus gobs of stories and essays, collecting two honorary…
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