For Alan J. Singerman, in token of friendship Murakami Harukidesu. I am Murakami Haruki. My novels have been translated all around the world, and when the latest one comes out, my readers line up all night to buy it as soon as possible—my books are as eagerly awaited as a Beatles album when I was young….
Janelle is my oldest friend, but the word “friend” is outdated. We are sitting in a diner that smells of old oil and toxic cleaning solution. My personal chef prepared a salmon benedict an hour before we got on the road, which Janelle refused before plopping down on an antique divan and barely looking at…
Last week, unfortunately on one of the evenings when Haseeb was home in time for dinner with me and the children, the watchman informed us that Mariam had died. Haseeb was annoyed on two accounts: one, that Mariam’s brother was outside and demanded to speak to me; two, that I hadn’t listened to his advice…
I It was possible, Mara discovered, for the smell of one place to cross oceans and airspace. One particular aroma—a drift of leather—had recently become a frequent guest, emerging for the first time in a long time on a cool July afternoon, as she sat on the balcony of her old flat in Bunga. It…
It is five in the morning in the worst of winter, and I wake up to a knock on the door (we bought the house last year, when everyone who could buy a house was buying a house, and were told to install a buzzer or a Ring or at least a peephole—everyone in the…
The scam looks something like this: we offer you a piano (a concert pianist, elder statesman, has slipped this mortal coil; the piano just needs a home), the only cost being that we have to ship it to you. You know how pianos are—“unwieldy” an understatement—and so you’ll just cover the moving costs and we’ll…
What I wanted to do Saturday night was head to my crafts club meet-up at the Pride Center, one of the few queer spaces in Brooklyn where I could safely assume my craft-hating ex-girlfriend would not make an appearance. What I was compelled to do instead, per orders from my sister, Theresa, was attend my…
What you need to know about Havaldar is that he claims he can tame any animal—horses, feisty goats, guard dogs that keep barking fruitlessly into the night. But nothing is harder in the world than milking a newly calved cow. Everyone in town knows that. And so, when one cow proves to be particularly stubborn,…
Nick almost hit the boy. He’d been driving down Burns Avenue on his way to teach a class about a story in which a boy is hit by a car. His mind was empty, an unfamiliar vacuity that made the road—white line between lanes, hill plunging into curves and trees, truck in the rearview mirror—into…
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