You wander into my thought,my happiness, the way the deerwander through the yard these days, very relaxed, with no thought of being hunted,browsing the bushes near the drivewaylike people at the refreshment table of an art opening… That’s how you come over me—not with a burst of wings,but with that slow, presumptuous air of entitlement,as…
In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extraliterary passions, and the roads not traveled. For my family, Plan B wasn’t the fallback plan for when life went awry. Life was already awry, and they’d already seen their hopes and ambitions compromised. So Plan B—what they would do if they…
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 haphazardlyat an accident site? And why explore the deafeningblandness of the little streets with fenced-in yards,where day after day—iPod loaded with arias—Ti prego, rubami il cuore!—I wheel the baby, who will not quietunless she’s…
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 almanacpredicts heat waves, hurricanes,other unlikelihoods. The old barin our town is serving seven cocktailsfor the price of six. The deck is open.Pleasure. You are coming homewith your pregnant girlfriendwhom no one has met. The babywill be named Bullet or Hunter or…
Did you ever see stars? asked my father with a cackle. He was notspeaking of the heavens, but the white flash in his head when a fist burstbetween his eyes. In Brooklyn, this would cause men and boys to slapthe table with glee; this might be the only heavenly light we’d ever see. I never…
When I hit thirteen, the noun between my legsturning into a verb, my father sat me down and said: one day you will have a wife of your own. A manwill come—a helpful neighbor knocking while you’re at work perhaps, or a garlicky colleagueat an office party, or a lifeguard on a spit of sand—…
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