Fiction

Helen Swann shivers in shirtsleeves at the bus stop, coatless and confident the day will warm. The city bus, as it lumbers toward her, cracks the ice that lines the gutter. Frost nubs its broad, bald forehead and clouds the immense windshield. Like glaucoma, Helen thinks. It’s one of the old buses, which means the…

Recommendation: I am delighted to nominate Brittani Sonnenberg, a senior at Harvard, and a member of my Creative Writing class last fall. Brit is a joy in every way: smart, unpretentious, perceptive, and adventurous. As a member of an improv comedy group, she is used to taking risks; you can see in her work, I…

Recommendation: Ms. Soppe’s work is nuanced and vivid, distinguished by a strong voice, a bold, experimental style, and wonderfully long sentences. In "The Pantyhose Man," the narrator is the collective spirit of the women who answer phones at a large Midwestern hotel. What begins as a comic account of how these women contend with obscene…

Recommendation: “The Quarrel” is a brilliantly written, searing glimpse into the life of Staszek Czyzowski, Polish survivor of World War II camps, and his ruined wife, Kasia. The writer’s exquisite portrait of this stubborn, furious man, rendered without a bit of sentimentality, is so devastating it takes my breath away each time I reread it….

Recommendation: I first encountered Ted Weesner, Jr. and his work when I heard him read at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and also at the Pen/New England Discovery awards. In both cases I was struck by his vivid characters and by the edgy, intimate, contemporary voice of his narrators. Later on the page, I found…

Recommendation: Kevin Wilson’s stories show us a world that is both real and full of illusion. One imagines the skies that sit over these towns are always a particularly vibrant shade of blue. The characters are people we almost know, and yet their lives are heightened, peculiar, both more dazzling and more tragic than our…

One day, waiting for a bus, standing on a street corner in Lower Manhattan, somewhere near Canal, having completed jury duty, having in fact judged another human being and found him guilty, she thought of justice, that heavy word. As a member of the general worldwide mothers’ union, she had watched the man’s mother. She…

We found the kittens in a pile, too young to even stagger, the mother too hungry herself to feed them, or caught by the dogs. We had a big old plastic purse with a blanket inside, and we put them all in there and hauled them around in the wagon. I liked them, they were…

Sarah was nine-about-to-be-ten. The world was taking its sweet time. And she was in the world. It was Easter, but it was also Fast Sunday, because Easter had fallen on the first Sunday of the month this year, so all the meetings were in a row, Sunday school, then fast and testimony meeting, which was…