Giverny, 1907 Quickly Émile took out the green wooden rowboat to lift fallen leaves off the pond. When Monsieur would come out of the pink stucco house at six in the morning, it had to be just right. With no breeze yet, the water lay like a liquid mirror, and Monsieur would want to paint…
Recommendation: Katherine Bell’s description of what her British post World War II woman finds buried in her backyard—her tiny garden—electrified me, not by what she found but by the delicacy of the description of what she found. A real writer. —Frank Conroy, director of the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and author of…
Recommendation: In haunting ways, Alicia Conroy’s “Mud-Colored Beauties of the Plains” not only recalls Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” in its sense of a mythic past beset by modern society, but it steps back a page. Conroy’s story springs from the source of creation—the mud bed of “fluvial life from amid tree…
Recommendation: I’m proud to nominate Patrick Michael Finn, one of my most accomplished, prolific former students and one of my favorite writers. Mr. Finn remains someone I talk about quite often, though he graduated in 1997, and someone whose stories have never left my mind. I still remember his characters—lonely Joliet teenagers struggling with religion and…
Recommendation: Alexai grew up and still lives in a Chicago neighborhood known as Pilsen/Little Village. It’s the largest barrio east of L.A. The neighborhood is the locus of Mexican culture in the Midwest. It is plagued by the usual economic problems that plague most immigrations, and in particular by street gangs. What attracts me to…
Recommendation: Jeff Parker has taken two fiction workshops with me at St. Petersburg Summer Literary Seminars in Russia. I have enjoyed and admired his humorous, absurdist stories, written with a light touch, easy-going sentences, yet with a great deal of discipline and compactness. In a playful attitude, he manages to develop drama and to render…
1 September There was nothing outside our town to warn you of its coming. One second you weren’t there and the next you were. It was more than a post office and more than a village, but it had no sprawl, it had no outskirts. The town huddled close together for protection, the desert everyone…
"At last," my husband said, when I had locked up for the night and come to bed. "You knew I would," I said. "But I didn’t know when." Propped up in the recently rented hospital bed, he peered more closely at my chosen book. A novel by Patrick O’Brian. "Wait, no, no," he said. "You…
I was in the kitchen when the FBI arrived. I had no idea who they were at first. Just two guys coming up the front walk. I felt the Watch Tower heading my way, I sensed conversion, vacuum cleaners, rubbery soap in small plastic buckets that could clean anything yet protect the surface. I threw…
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