Nonfiction

Cover for Two Essays

Two Essays

The Danger of the Everyday On September 7, 1978, while crossing London’s Waterloo Bridge on his way to work at the BBC, the Bulgarian writer and journalist Georgi Markov was shot in the right leg with a 1.52-millimiter poisonous pellet—as tiny as the tip of a ballpoint pen—by an undercover agent of Bulgaria’s intelligence services….

6:00 a.m. Chicken

At twenty-five and with little direction in my life, I decided to volunteer in a soup kitchen. Several years after graduating college, things had fallen into a quarter-life stability: I was living in Boston, working as an administrative assistant at a nonprofit, making enough money to cover expenses and go out to dinner and drinking…

Eulogy

“I had to get away from her,” my husband whispered as we lay together in bed. For thirty years, I’d heard only his sharp, flinted words, the stories about his mother no more than a few terse sentences—“She sacrificed me to my stepfather. She let him beat me. She beat me too”—his resentment flaring on…

Transparent

I sat in the corner of a crowded one-room bookshop nibbling a complimentary madeleine and listening for the words that would signal the start of a marathon reading. “For a long time,” Marcel Proust’s seven-volume In Search of Lost Time begins, “I used to go to bed early.” Bed was a long way off for…

Old School (6.5)

Old School

In the fall of 1987 after driving across the country to study at the University of Iowa, I found myself enrolled in James Alan McPherson’s fiction workshop, not knowing how I’d ended up there. The rumor circulated that, like a magisterial conductor of a symphony orchestra, the Iowa Workshop office manager, Connie Brothers, somehow made…

Introduction

What are these stories and why are they here? As this issue’s guest editor, I suppose it’s part of my job to justify their existence, though, as with my own work, I’m tempted to say just read them. No disclaimers or praise from me will change your appreciation of them. Their charms should be self-evident,…