As if hallucinations made of words could hallucinate themselves beyond the words, out of the books, out of the newest on display behind the window, and the ones on tables in the gloom or ranged on shelves in different sections; out of the pages building to betrayal, out of the spectral signatures of doom of…
“Reading Jim Shepard,” says Michael Chabon, “is like encountering our national literature in microcosm.” This is true, though there’s nothing (merely) national about it. In an oeuvre that now includes six novels (Flights, Paper Doll, Lights Out in the Reptile House, Kiss of the Wolf, Nosferatu, Project X), three story collections (Batting Against Castro, Love…
In the scene where the cow jumps over the moon the little dog laughs with his mouth wide open. Comforted by the same thirty words he’s heard fifty times the boy leans sideways into his mother. Before this they’d walked by the water. Before that they’d spread their blanket on the grassy bank, and before…
The sandhogs who blasted the Lincoln Tunnel jerry-rigged an escarpment a quarter-mile down but it buckled at riptide and one journeyman was sucked into the air pocket, up through the lattice, through the ooze under the Hudson, to surface in daylight—how the hell did he remember to drop his ninety pound jute sack and let…
The summer I turn forty I pretend I am still young enough to sit with my college self at the library before disappearing in a field of smoke. Don’t my jeans still fit? Can’t I see without glasses if I just hold the book a little farther from my face? Then, hiking with my daughter,…
The summer I raised orphaned songbirds in Wisconsin, the spare room in my house was scattered with plastic laundry baskets, each containing one berry box lined with tissue. Every twenty minutes, I walked from basket to basket, offering a needle-less syringe of soupy formula to the nestlings I’d placed in the berry boxes. If the…
Kenya, Africa. Africa! Nine thousand miles from Portland. My wayward son Tim walks toward me with four tall, dark-as-midnight women. He has seen me, I’m quite sure of it, but nothing about his gait changes. He arrives at the tent and doesn’t say a word, or make any motion toward me. The thirty or so…
Here is the paint-by-numbers painting of Sitting Bull’s pony she painted. Here is her imitation Navajo loom she used to weave turquoise blankets. Here is her afternoon martini shaker and the prescription Black Beauties. Mahjong tiles click rhythmically by arthritic hands of her bilingual generation. Outside the rain rains sideways, horizontal as this world is,…
Here in this little town in Pennsylvania where I spend half the week and the whole long summer, we are urged to buy local. This is a pleasure, not a duty or a difficulty. The rewards are multiple: sticking it to the multinationals, high quality merchandise, real personal exchanges. Becoming known. The place in town…
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