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…
My career as a kid magician reached its height in eighth grade in the Eckstein Middle School Talent Show. I’d gone from performing in church basements and private homes to the cavernous auditorium at the heart of our school, with its banks of colored lights, its gargantuan raked balcony, and its rows of fold-down wooden…
Last summer on Martha’s Vineyard, Lauren Groff and I went running. I have a lot of endurance—I ran a marathon back in 2001—but my usual pace is middling: I tend to run nine-minute miles. But my first mile with Lauren clocked in at 6:52 (I know because I have an app on my phone that…
“Please, Sylvia, give me a moment to think.” These are the last words you hear your father speak. You are eleven, and the two of you are traveling midsummer through eastern Idaho headed for Glacier National Park. It’s the year your mother passed, and so much has been hard and empty since the long suffering…
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