Fiction

Alberto Perera, librarian, granted no credibility to police profiles of dangerous persons. Writers, down through the centuries, had that look of being up to no good and were often mistaken for smugglers, assassins, fugitives from justice-criminals of all sorts. But the young man invading his sanctum, hands hidden in the pockets of his badly soiled…

Having begun the day with a headache, Bonnie Saks was not particularly surprised to find herself finishing it the same way. Pain, in her experience, never disappeared; it merely retreated for a while and then came back when least convenient in another form. Like men, she thought. All afternoon there had been a chilly, puttering…

Ellie found her son in the school nurse’s office, laid out on a leatherette fainting couch like some child gothic, his shoes off, his arms crossed over his chest, his face turned to the wall. “What’s the deal, Kid Cody?” When he heard her voice, he turned only his head toward her, slowly, as if…

‘Yde’s the name. Edward ‘yde . . . or Hyde, as educated folk like yourself would have it. That’s my real name, although for the past fifty years, Hyde has stayed hidden under the moniker of Edward Layman. To the good people here in the West Midlands, I’m just Layman or Ed, no different from…

The summer I was fourteen, I went to stay in a small house in Connecticut with my grandmother and grandfather. My mother sent me there, she told me years later, because I was driving her crazy, coming home late, shirking my chores, smoking my father’s cigarettes. She wanted me out of the house, she said,…

Traveling alone, Martin Grant came to a place on the coast in the rain. A place much as he had imagined-green and balmy, with bright splashes of winter flowers and fruit trees and tall palms that rustled in the wind. A place so far from the frozen cornfields of central Iowa that it made him…

A man walks into the gallery on a sunny afternoon carrying a fistful of golf clubs. I’m aware that there’s been some kind of traffic thing going on outside for the last few minutes, but I haven’t gone to the window to check it out-happens all the time around here. The softening silence of the…

Deborah set about making herself useful from the minute she woke up, and most mornings she was first in the household to rise. She pushed off the bedcovers, slipped into her robe, and washed in the bathroom, dressing cautiously and wincing if a zipper or button clanked against the closet door; her bed was in…

I was fourteen that summer. August brought heat I had never known, and during the dreamlike drought of those days, I saw my father for the first time in my life. The tulip poplars had faded to yellow before September came. There was no rain for weeks, and the people’s faces along Eleventh Street wore…