Fiction

1 Half awake, pawing at the night table for The Book of Great Conversations, I knock the bottle onto the floor. The sound hangs there: there's a ringing part of it and a shattering part of it and a splashing part of it. I smell the gin. Well, it can stay there until I feel…

My father found himself in Boston once, ten thousand myths away from Oklahoma. I think of him standing on the rim of the Atlantic, the horizon vertical as it describes the Upperworld and the Underworld. It was the water that attracted him, as if he were some kin to the Watermonster, as if he’d heard…

Lee Trambath was a fifty-five-year-old restaurant manager, with three ex-wives and five children. He was a slender, dark-haired man with a trimmed beard that was mostly gray, and he lived and worked in a small Massachusetts town, near the sea. The children were from his first two marriages, three daughters and two sons, grown now…

The reservoir was low. Waiting in the bushes for Jack Noble's car, I searched the water's skin for the steeple of the church that lay drowned beneath. My father had explained how the village of Neversink had stood here until the late 1940s, when the river was dammed and the valley became a giant cup…

They were in a bar far from home when she realized he was falling to pieces. That's what she'd thought: Why, he's falling to pieces. The place was called Gary's. "Honey," he said. He took the napkin from his lap and dipped it in his gin. He leaned toward her and started wiping her face,…

This novel, titled Recipes From the Dump, is a mock cookbook of our culture. Spoken in the first person, the main character is a single mother of three, trying to cope in a world that appears to be falling apart. While reading the personals and taking evening walks with her wise neighbor, Gabby Fulbriten assembles…

On the plane coming back to Louisiana for my father’s funeral, I remembered a story he used to tell when I was a child. It was this: A little girl is crossing over a bridge. There’s a troll under the bridge who doesn’t like little girls; any that cross over, he eats them up. But…

On their last day in Puerto Vallarta, the fathers rented horses. Ellen's father let her come along, though she was only eleven and hadn't ridden before. She stayed close to his side, staring at the tin shacks and rows of hobbled corn along the back streets. Her father drank wine from a pig-bladder pouch and…

A new student-Stephanie Adams-stopped by Professor O'Reilly's office that day, and what she wanted him to do was preposterous. She was a striking, blond-haired girl with large eyes, a small, rather prim mouth, and a bright, nervous manner. What she hoped to persuade him to do would ordinarily have been easy to provide: a recommendation…