If it is late Sunday in the brain & sunlight falling on the wall of the Food Court and you tell me your daughter at eighteen months still breast-feeds, and if I with my slightly younger daughter sitting at the next table nod but say nothing, nothing, while you speak of the vicissitudes of cracked-nipples…
It is still dark when the trucks take us to work in the citrus groves, when we pull on our gloves and climb ladders into the trees. In the morning dark, workers go without faces. They are trunks and limbs like the trees they inhabit. I am counting the people like trees, counting in Hebrew…
You said she kept leaving you for a dentist, a gay prostitute whose boyfriend has AIDS, and the short-order cook who bruised her. She needed someone pretty in her bed. You’d always wait, stay home until she threw rocks to break your window, begging to be let in. She taught you to want bath water…
Did he save them from the Holocaust to profit his soul, or to make a profit? Did he make them his slaves to protect them from the Holocaust, or to protect his investment? “He represented the German system—a guy who could make money.” He made them slaves. He saved them. He profited. Was there any…
translated by George Evans and the author I love this body that’s lived through life, its amphora shape, its water smoothness, its streaming hair that crowns the skull, the delicate stem of its crystal face ascending exquisitely from shoulders and collarbones. I love my back sprayed with muted bright stars, my translucent hills, wellsprings of…
I was told to lie down in the cart, and I did. My braided hair mixed with straw under me to catch the blood I seeped. Then she covered me with heavy furs and brush. The night was stark and cold, the stars close and multiplying like cells as we creaked along under them a…
Tobias Wolff, The Night in Question, short stories: The fourteen tales in this book, Wolff’s first collection in over a decade, amply confirm his place as one of the best storytellers of our time. (Knopf)
I had been awake since balmy Tokyo on a train from lights of pornographic neon to places in silent mountains I will never see again. Across from me in the sleeper an old man undressed the veins in his legs looked like green lightning in hairless, gold skin. He wrapped himself in a robe moved…
1. The one she loves she hates. And too late, she says, for the thing love’s become to let her loose from its grip. They take it to the hills. Green tent in blue mountains. They’d bought themselves fishing licenses, and the conversation began on trout—cutthroat and Dolly V’s—names bruised and asthmatically deep inside the…
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