Fiction

  First, her name was Jane, and if that wasn’t bad enough, one day, while she was sitting in the dining hall and drawing her trademark Jews—tiny cartoon men with beards and wisdom who decorated the edge of all her notebooks—the men got up off the page, shimmied down a table leg, and bused her…

  [postcard text] I am awfully fond of this garden. How pretty are those plants & flowers! There is a grotto in this garden I was afraid to enter as it is too dark there, but at last decided. It is full of passages, the water runs over the walls outside. With best wishes Yours…

The ashtray was given as a wedding present to the young couple who later grew unhappy and died, but that was not the fault of any inanimate object. Made from crystal cut into pleasing shapes, it was held aloft by the bride, Flora, the day after the wedding. Already she thought she could see the…

from Inheritance When she was thirty-four, no longer a young woman, my grandmother Chanyi crossed West Lake to see a fortuneteller. She didn’t tell my grandfather; she wished to keep her fate a secret. Perhaps her years of married life had deepened her need for privacy. “You come along, Junan,” she told my mother. “She’ll…

The mute boy was dragging the great stalled clock from his father’s study to the trash heap that smoldered at the edge of the woods when an old man with a stick chased him. Back when the boy’s father was alive, he’d tried to console his son, and maybe himself as well, by telling him…

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….