Earlier in her literary career, Mary Gordon was fond of quoting Flannery O’Connor, who’d once said that writers learned everything they needed to know before the age of eight. What does Gordon — the celebrated, bestselling author of four novels, three collections, and a memoir — believe she had learned? “I think I learned the…
At the end of the dark at the end of the hall, my older sister stood by the mirror, casting for her real face in a square of light. I was eight. Had she known that I was still awake, pillow doubled under to raise my head, she’d have screamed and slammed the bathroom door,…
I meet my father in a restaurant. He knows why I have asked to meet him, but he swaggers in anyway. It’s a place near his office, and he hands out hellos all around as he makes his way over to my table. “My daughter,” he explains to the men who have begun to grin,…
Ann Beattie, My Life, Starring Dara Falcon, a novel: Beattie’s sixth novel is narrated, with soaring irony and comic verve, by Jean Warner, a young bride in New England whose life and marriage are spun helter-skelter by the arrival of Dara Falcon, a brilliant, pathological liar. (Knopf)
It wasn’t lewd or revealing of anything round except my shoulders which Mother forever urged back with military brio, yellow—never my best color— a square of magenta for the bust, bought in the Village at mod, expensive Paraphernalia (what Grandpa called his bait and tackle; his paraphernalia). Did you know that store? Glossy white go-go…
I n the future, everyone will be someone else. At her school, the future had been discussed as if it were a definite sort of business, with tangible boundaries like an island nation. It was a place you could rocket to or grope towards in a state of anticipation. But if thinking about your actual…
Richard Ford, Women with Men, three stories: Three long stories which once again demonstrate Ford’s mastery. Two of the stories are set in contemporary Paris, the third in Montana-all about men trying to fathom the women they love. (Knopf)
Celestine Truxa was born in Salzburg on the eve of Metternich’s coronation as prince. According to the midwife, her mother split up the middle like a birch tree hit by lightning, managing to stay alive just long enough to see her daughter’s face lodged in the crook of her husband’s arm, eloquent of birth and…
Alvin Boudreaux had outlived his neighbors. His asbestos-siding house was part of a tiny subdivision built in the 1950’s, when everybody had children, a single-lane driveway, a rotating TV antenna, and a picnic table out back. Nowadays he sat on his little porch and watched the next wave of families occupy the neighborhood, each taking…
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