My grandmother is tired. She sits at the foot of my bed and asks where I go. I show her my books, and she smiles at the text for Chinese 101. As I turn the pages, she reads the characters she knows—moon, noodles, peace, fear—and asks about those she does not. “We haven’t learned that…
“I’ve decided the only thing that really interests me is how the sun hits a white wall.” —Edward Hopper to Andrew Wyeth Somehow the crow snuck in, its caws echo in the fluorescence of the hallways. We are all waiting at the ICU ward for your suffering to come to an end….
Haydn conducting the first performance of the Farewell Symphony for Count Esterhazy in his palace, the work composed so that here and there an instrument would cease, each bewigged and bespectacled musician pack up his case and depart, the rich sounds in that great hall, with its plaster curlicues and cherubs and six-foot candelabra, diminishing…
It is thicker than a woman’s hair. A boat tipped on its side spills a gift into the waters. The lake holds a hundred and two wonders in its still embrace. A cold wind wrinkles its surface like a spent sheet. You cannot write on it the way you do on a wasp’s hive. A…
When Gus sees his father, they don’t speak of it. His mother is dead. What was it that he did when he was ten? He remembers his father stripping him and hosing him down outside, and beating him with a peeled switch. Sent to his room without dinner, he grew up dreading the evening meal….
Before work I would stop by Constantine’s place for a glass of red wine and a cup of coffee. He kept the wine under the counter and poured it in secret into a large tumbler. “If anyone asks,” he once said, “tell them it’s the milk of a red cow.” You could tell which men…
More than a few people have assumed that Howard Norman is a Canadian writer. It’s no wonder, considering that most of his work — including his first two novels, The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist, both of which were nominated for the National Book Award — is set in Canada. In fact, Norman was…
What she is waiting for never arrives or arrives so slowly she can’t see it: like the river bluing silver and wearing minutely deeper into its channel, the flow hardens to carved stone as she fidgets beneath the whirling fan impatient for the train that rocks us above the water to…
The wine is perfect, an arterial red, a red so serious in candlelight it’s black. He lifts the chipped glass and toasts his brother with a slight nod, a little backward gesture of the head only the two of them understand. The late night crowds around the closed windows giving back the two old men,…
No products in the cart.