Fiction

When Adam "Drew" Drewshevsky, a.k.a. Dickie DeLong, returned to his hometown of Sherman, Ohio, his old friend Barry Borkowski took him out for a beer at Don"s Underworld and raised a glass to the Prince of Porn. There was truth to the title: In the past decade, Drew had made more than three hundred erotic…

When Paul Loy was ten years old, watching the movers unload the Allied Van Lines truck at his family’s new house in upstate New York, all the white kids on Ableman Avenue materialized. When his parents told him he’d have to learn to get along, even though he didn’t understand the concept of passing, that…

       Was toward the end of your shift, a Saturday, another one of those long slow lazy afternoons of summer—sun never burning through the clouds, clouds never breaking into rain—the odometer like a clock ticking all these bored little pent-up streets and mills and tenements away. The coffee shops, the liquor stores, laundromats, police, fire, gas…

       In a hospital in Kansas City, Stan Wachtel’s wife, Celia, was dying. Outside it was the middle of February, raw and blustery, but in her hospital room the air was thick and warm, perhaps heated by the glow of all the machines monitoring her bodily functions. Her heart, that wretched fist, pumped listlessly, as if…

       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…

  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…