Clare can’t walk. She has sprained her ankle so badly, it’s no better than broken. Marble step, wet leaf, a moment of distraction, and she was pulled up, several feet above the landing and dropped like a bag of laundry, her fingers sliding down the wet iron banister, her feet bending and flopping like…
What makes a good story? Could the question be asked, What makes a story good? There are nine answers. Here’s one. One summer many years ago, I was in the mountains of Utah installing a catch-basin water system for a remote cabin. My dear friend George had a blue backhoe on a trailer which had…
De Español y de India Produce Mestizo —after a series of Casta paintings by Juan Rodríguez Juárez, ca. 1715 The canvas is a leaden sky behind them, heavy with words, gold letters inscribing an equation of blood— this plus this equals this—as if a contract with nature, or a museum label, …
At fifty-eight, Ron Carlson is gray-haired, large-boned, one of those men who at six-foot-something is big without being imposing. He could pass for a park ranger at the Grand Canyon, or your local TV anchor, or maybe a third-base coach in the majors, and he seems solid and grounded in ways that go with those…
ANDREA AVERY is a writer, pianist, and editor who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. She has finished a book of stories, some of which have been published in the anthology Shade 2006 (Four Way Books). She received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Arizona State University. RICHARD BAKER is an artist living in Brooklyn, New York….
The Sharma family’s trip to Bombay didn’t go well. The Royal Nepal Airlines plane started acting funny after half an hour—a strange sound choked the left wing, and the plane began to hiccup—so they had to land in Patna, where the passengers were forced to stay in a hotel for the night. The mishap would…
In Spain I never rode the Talgo. The Talgo was the express train from Barcelona to Paris, but I never went to Barcelona. This was years before the Olympics, and Franco was finally dead. The white gorilla was still around and all the Gaudi, but I never made it there. Partly it was the expense….
Donald Hall recommends Eastern Mountain Time, poems by Joyce Peseroff: “These poems are local and universal, intimate accounts of landscape and people—with an almost pervasive shadow of elegy. In ‘The Ridge’ she makes a tableau of the dead, from a friend to a father. Always loss is mixed with joy, especially in the natural world—no…
Or a gauze that only measures a wound. Or a path of frozen ruts, mocking escape. What remains is a distraction, the ratio of exhibitionism to buoyancy. Which loses its shape first? Lung smoke? Stocking?
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