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…
"You shouldn’t play with fire." Lena leans over Ivan’s shoulder and blows out the votive candle over which he is passing his index finger back and forth. She jiggles her arm nervously, and the silver bracelet slides beneath her sleeve. She looks around her. Everywhere there is plenty. The people are fat. How can some…
Lucy calls Greg up as soon as she gets to her office. She was the one who had to run, as soon as the teacher conference was over, who took off out of there like a bat out of hell, heading for her car, leaving Greg to walk more leisurely home, no doubt stopping on…
We have a grandfather somewhere. We don’t know where—I mean, we kiddos don’t. Not anymore. Mostly we remember him at the low house by the lake. Grousing at the black flies, stinking up Nature with the smell of his burning charcoal-and-plum pipe tobacco. A stout figure, like an orator in some senate, he liked to…
“Quick weddings and short marriages are all I know,” I admitted in my interview at June’s Brides, “but I love lace, and I’m capable of telling white lies to brides’ mothers. I was a psych minor, so I know everything is harder than it looks.” I got the job. And for the next few years,…
Jackie Flynn just turned eleven, but he has already spent plenty of time inside the Knickerbocker, a dark smoky barroom where men with rulers in their back pockets drink beer and stare at a soundless TV. Whenever his father goes out to do what he calls "moonlighting," Jackie’s mother insists that Jackie accompany him. She…
Before they had ever lived in the house, somebody’s useless cow had sickened and died in the shed next door. The shaggy rope that tethered her still lay in a corner, so when Sonia figured out that her older sister, Goldie, was having to do with a boy, she got up in the night, disentangled…
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