I say: “I guess I’d better take your name…” She says: “It’s Shelley…as in Byron, Keats, and Shelley.” “Hah!…I’m glad you like them too!” I say. “Oh, yes,” says Shelley. “I wish my name were Keats, but it’s not…” I add. “I do too!” she responds. “Thank you for choosing Verizon Wireless.”
Translated by John Cullen We were in Paradise: there was the fig tree and, over on the right, the apple tree, only half of which I could see through the big French window that opened onto the courtyard; there was moreover a cloud of birds so dense you could imagine it contained an infinite number…
Translated by Lydia Davis When he starts telling stories, people gradually leave the table or turn away and talk about something else, and generally I’m the one who then has the bad luck to be obliged to listen to him. Someone must listen to him, after all, and he is a friendly man and a…
Translated by Lydia Davis Egon is no longer with us, we have buried him—we, a little band of people. Egon was my friend, and he was my reader. I knew him a long time and really from a distance, one of many in the bar, and he burdened people with tricky questions, he could really…
A sudden gust of wind blew strands of Polly Stillman’s brown hair across her face, obscuring her view of the late afternoon sun on Hatch’s Bay. No matter, she didn’t see a composition anyway. In past summers, this scene usually inspired a painting—of beach grass shadows slashing the bright dunes; of a large rock, encrusted…
Begin with the priest, that towering old man, narrow as a cornstalk and motionless in the vacancy between lectern and pulpit. His attachment to the tick-tock undertaking of time is acting up. He gets stuck in certain moments or skips ahead like those oft-scratched forty-fives of his youth. Stationary on the elevated platform, he poses…
People called his music inspired and wicked. They said the man was gifted with crazy guitar fingers that could make you weep one moment and get you shouting hot damn the next. His first manager used to brag to any ear that would listen: Take your girl to hear him, Kreuter will get you laid—and…
Tuesday I’m trying to figure out if you can have two thoughts at once. I mean really think about two things simultaneously, not like be hungry and do math at the same time, which is what I was doing when I originally started wondering in the first place. Focus is my Achilles’ heel. Eric figured…
translated from the Spanish by Sarah Viren Chapter 1 “Tino, come here,” his mom called him back to her bedside. Tino was on his way out, but stopped. The nurse had been searching for something among medicine bottles on the bedside table and also looked up. “Take care of your dad,” Tino’s mom said. “I…
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