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…
Colm Tóibín is a gentleman. A very witty, charming, lively, and sometimes deliciously louche gentleman, but a gentleman all the same, though one senses that he might not wish for that to be said too loudly. He has the beauty of a boxer—strong chest, light on his feet, precise in his movements and in his…
b. h. fairchild The Game Field lights that span the evening sky, siren songs of kind, loud girls in thigh-high skirts, the clatter of our shoulder pads and cleats, and then the crowd in its great hunger rising up as we stride across that green plane bright with new lime and dreams of high school…
Getting out of his car one night, he discovers—No! It’s gone!—the ring he’d worn on his left pinky for more than thirty years. He treasured it. Not because an old lover had given it to him—she’d stopped meaning anything to him decades ago. But because it was an elegant thing: “like gold to airy thinness…
Voyager 2 traveled another 800,000 miles today. Launched on August 20, 1977, the spacecraft is still sending data to the radio telescopes of the Deep Space Network in the Mojave desert around Goldstone. Any information dispatched today—about the solar winds that Voyager is flying through—will have taken thirteen hours to travel back 8.6 billion miles…
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