I recently worked with Nickolas Butler here in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His literary focus remains the same, explorations of the human quest for meaning and value. In this story, Lyle, the primary character, loses his settled job and his settled place within a community. Searching for a deeper, more meaningful sense of self, he…
The duende got into my head by the back staircase, a gypsy girl-child dressed in red with an old man’s face. My bedroom turned bitter cold. There were banging noises, loud knockings in between the walls. Things left their places. My comb crawled across the bureau, clicking like castanets. My grandmother’s ivory-backed mirror cracked itself…
I was born in the Tuscan city of Siena, and among my earliest and fondest memories is having sat long ago on my father’s lap at a table outside the Piazza del Campo, with the Fountain of Gaia gurgling nearby, watching, wide-eyed, as Papa’s pencil turned blank paper into cartoon animals on my behalf. His…
“Downstream” accomplishes several things I find deeply pleasing. First and foremost, it allows me to spend time in the company of a character whose wit and determination I admire from the opening paragraph. Almost everyone seems to be against Clay—his parents, his grandparents, his neighbor, the local shopkeeper—but, however many slings and arrows come his…
The wolves came down from the hills and carried away the children of Chinook. The village lay wedged into a horseshoe beneath those white hills, twelve winding miles from Norton Sound. First one child was taken at the start of winter as he tugged his sled at the edge of a slope; another was snatched…
Let me practice silence with you. You have an extra room in your hut and a wooden balcony overlooking a ravine of moonlight. I can sleep in this bare corner, on the floor-planks with a blanket and a stone for a pillow. We can work on our separate projects in each other’s shadow. Let us…
For anyone who has been following contemporary fiction in the past few years, Laura van den Berg needs no introduction. Her debut collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, lit up the literary landscape upon its release. The praise came in bunches, culminating with being named a…
I have had just about all I can take of myself. —S. N. Behrman There’s a rose bush outside, like the one by the kitchen where Serena some evenings uncovered a pasta dish, beyond exquisite. My new wife and I would inhale its perfumes and sigh. Not like Adamo, her husband, who’d barely touch it….
A hornet’s nest hung above one of the French doors that led to the Quists’ back terrace. Harrison Quist first noticed it when he took out the garbage one Thursday morning in early June. He told his wife, Marcie, about it as he dressed for work, calling it a bee’s nest, and telling her to…
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