Fiction

Next year, writing his personal experience essay to convince admissions at Penn he's Ivy League material despite uneven grades, he'll describe in amusing detail the one baseball game his father took him to, and get in on a scholarship despite his father's explicit pessimism. And he'll do well, though he's not as brilliant as his…

They always meet us at the door and search what we're carrying, before we can go in. It's the same for everybody -routine-but it makes me feel guilty. As if they think we'd be trying to smuggle in something dangerous. The thing is, we don't even realize sometimes, my wife and I. What counts as…

When I saw the sign for piglets I told my father to stop the car. "I want to buy one," I said, attempting to say this with conviction. The thought of raising a pig over the summer had come as suddenly as the sign. "How are you going to raise a pig when you're so…

Translated from Greek by Martin McKinsey She had always said, "When I die, if my Angel comes and takes me for a last look at all the places I've ever lived in or been to, it won't take him more than a couple of minutes." In other words, that's how sheltered and paltry her life…

I The lemon tree splatters a lacy shadow over the hot grass. A main bough gave out five years ago under the weight of fruit the size of croquet balls, which should have been picked but wasn't (there are just so many things you can do with lemons). The scar from the missing limb is…

Wyman knows the girl is awake because he hears her finger nails clicking on the passenger-side window, keeping measures of the music that comes through the radio. He wants to glance at her, but is nervous about taking his eyes off the road in the dark. Audra Barranco, she said her name is. He loves…

1. Come back, little Sheeba. That's Uncle Jack thinking he's being smart, but I don't answer. I keep picking strawberries, my fingers red as the berries so I get mixed up thinking I'm seeing a ripe one to grab when it's only my own hand deep in the green leaves. Twenty quarts, twenty-one quarts. One…

Cal used to be president of their fraternity. But then he was in a car wreck. Cal and Hap and a group of boys from the fraternity house had been out to the bars, and they were on their way home. Afterward Hap often pictured Cal dipping his hand into a cooler of beer, letting…

The Stratton Military School for Boys is a quadrangle surrounded by low buildings, surrounded by a stone wall, surrounded by the mountains of north central Pennsylvania. The school is on a hillside above the white clapboard houses of the nearby town. It is a steep slope, the kind where kids might go sledding in winter….