Fiction

       They glowed, the first day after their wedding, like planets in the morning sky, and their movements, no matter the task—packing gifts, choosing deli sandwiches, examining the map—were stately and serene.        The second day, in the car, she said she was homesick. For their wedding, of all things. "It went too fast." He lifted a…

       The light in the morning made him happy. It was one of the few things that did now. It arrived discreetly filtered, not to disturb him, then poured in when Pablino came to open the shutters, lighting up the dark corners and bleaching the embroidery on the nineteenth-century bench at the foot of the bed….

October        Another night in the hospital and nothing makes sense to you but that yellow-eyed cat, seething, slobbering, Ahab-mad, nightly one a.m., TV38. You are stuck in bed on an intravenous paralytic, so many sites blown, bruised to hell, the nurses have had to work their way up one arm and down another, all of…

The house where I grew up burned about thirty years ago. It was situated a few miles north of Loring, near the intersection of two country roads, only one of which was paved when I was a boy. The one we lived on wasn’t, and my dad considered it a major triumph when he managed…

Opening chapter of The Condition, by Jennifer Haigh To be published by HarperCollins in May 2008   Summer comes late to Massachusetts. The gray spring is frosty, unhurried:  wet snow on the early plantings, a cold lesson for optimistic gardeners, for those who have not learned. Chimneys smoke until Memorial Day. Then, all at once,…

Adler, Professor of Rabbinics (Emeritus), was annoyed that the young man sitting next to him was interfering with his sleep. Through slitted eyes he watched him, plugged into his music, listlessly turning the pages of a magazine, giving out somehow all the traits Adler had come to dislike in the young—vanity, narcissism, the insouciant attention…

The following excerpts are from Archangel , a hybrid work that takes as its center the unnamed “monster” in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In Shelley’s book (so very different from the movies) the “monster” learns to read by overhearing cottagers giving lessons to a foreigner. Subsequently he reads many books-including Paradise Lost, Volney’s Ruins of Empire,…

The air outside was warm and wet, like breath. Feeling the breeze on his face, the baby stopped crying and looked up at the sky. I turned him around and leaned him against my chest, holding him with one hand curled under his arms, the other cupping his bottom. He gently kicked his legs, as…

  Some people think travel is unsafe. They don’t trust the aeronautic logic of planes, and they think the rest of the earth is more bloody and troubled and roiling than wherever they’re from. I’d never been one of those people, though I taught a course called Patterns of Civic Unrest in the Post-Colonial World…