The novelist and short-story writer Peter Ho Davies was born in 1966 in Coventry, England. Peter’s father had grown up in North Wales and Peter spent most of his boyhood vacations there with family, amid countryside he has described as beautiful but also—from a boy’s perspective—“slightly dull.” His mother was of Chinese descent and met…
What am I doing, trudging around Natick, Massachusetts, so archetypal in its split-level, clapboard ordinariness, one house after another like a crowd gathered haphazardly at an accident site? And why explore the deafening blandness of the little streets with fenced-in yards, where day after day—iPod loaded with arias— Ti prego, rubami il cuore!—I wheel the…
The Look2 essay series, which replaces our print book reviews, takes a closer look at the careers of accomplished authors who have yet to receive the full appreciation that their work deserves. Reviews of new books can still be found on our blog at http://pshares.org/ I. In her 1977 novel, Quartet in Autumn,…
I bargained with God once—even wanted my poor mother—in a flooded cave in central Florida. Let me out. Let me finish my book. For about three electric seconds the fanged rock through which I crawled yielded like warm flesh. * Another time, I got lost inside a shipwreck, in the North Channel between Lakes…
You have been away too long. For pleasure. On business. You are coming home and the almanac predicts heat waves, hurricanes, other unlikelihoods. The old bar in our town is serving seven cocktails for the price of six. The deck is open. Pleasure. You are coming home with your pregnant girlfriend whom no one has…
This interview about the Blacksmith House Poetry Series, which will celebrate its fortieth anniversary in 2013, was edited and condensed from a tape recording made as part of the Cambridge Historical Society’s oral history initiative. Gail Mazur is the author of six books of poetry, including They Can’t Take That Away from Me, a…
It always seems wrong to me that Kawabata Yasunari’s strange and wonderful fiction is left out of the ongoing conversation about the future of the novel. The debate in the U.S. is often framed in terms of fiction vs. nonfiction (David Shields, Sheila Heti), or realistic vs. metafiction (Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Milan Kundera,…
Leda would take the train. She hadn’t been on one in some time. A few days before, she read about a woman who killed herself on the track. She just lay there until it came. You never heard of that anymore—it seemed to have gone out of style. She didn’t think it was the best…
By wings whose shapes are but half a heart? Feathers oiled with country clubs and gasps of delight? Not for these the sandhill crane shakes her beaded voice. Gauche and gangrene, she is the gatekeeper of gibe, a cement-gray song edged and pocked in grassy fields, a frock of scarlet over her eye, her own…
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