Fiction

       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 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…

We were the News-of-the-World Theater Collective, moving from city to city together; we were all married to each other and to the idea of what you could pull from the streams of the news that ran over and around and through our lives. We wanted no one to ever again let that information splash over…

  When I was in fifth grade at a private school for boys in Newton, Massachusetts, my geography teacher, Mr. Neale, was blind, had been blind for some years, probably on account of some gradual degenerative disease. This was in 1952. Mr. Neale was a large man, with a round face and thick fleshy ears;…

Each day she woke before dawn and walked the grounds of the American hospital. She didn’t go far. She kept to the footpaths that encircled the main hall, past the evergreens and the timber cottages now used as additional wards for the wounded. It had once been a Japanese vocational school for the arts, and…

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,…