Fiction

When Gracie Kang's elder twin sisters reached the age of eighteen, they went down to the Alameda County Shipyards and got jobs piecing battleships together for the U.S. Navy. This was the place to find a husband in 1945, if a girl was doing her own looking. They were Americans, after all, and they were…

It is two o'clock on a Friday afternoon in April. The willows along the river north of town are a tender grasshopper-green; patches of henbit and bitter cress sprout like tufts of hair in the winter-weary yards. In the basement of the library on Main Street, Miss Lucy McKewn, age thirty-six, assistant librarian, cleans up…

My father is telling me about Victoria again. I smile, nod, remind him I am a journalist and that I cannot just sit down and write a book about Victoria because he is sure it will make a best seller, full of romance, intrigue, and heartbreak. "It's rags to riches to rags again!" my father…

The day the shortstop died, Katie Mays was in the kitchen, arranging a sprig of baby's breath, fresh from the garden, onto her father's breakfast tray. Merely glancing at the front-page headlines, she opened the Daily Oklahoman to page five-sports scores and standings-and placed it neatly next to the cut-glass pitcher of orange juice. More…

MORNING Alvin Bishop rises at dawn and faces east, framed in his bedroom window, a thin, naked man, skin the white of flour, hair wild from sleep and as dark as the earth. The sun's light, but not the sun, is visible to him, as if the thing itself were buried nightly beneath the rows…

When finishing graduate school at Harvard, Manny Chokra met with instant and astonishing success. At the age of twenty-six, quite by chance, he made two new discoveries in the field of neurological physiology, and though his dissertation was barely complete, universities all over the country were offering him jobs. Manny accepted a tenure-track position at…

After the protests began, I started running on the beach. I went up every day after work, took off my long sleeves and concealing skirts, slid into nylon shorts and a tanktop. Then I ran. Two kilometers north along the curve of the beach, followed by a swim in the warm, enervating sea. The run…

We're mining a vein of blue clay under the red dusty Texas topsoil, squaring up a ditch the backhoe left too rough and can't get back to. We slice at the walls with the sides of our shovels and peel up from the bottom long curls of clay that twist away like orange rind. "The…

There was a time when gas station attendants cleaned car windshields with soft blue paper towels. My dad inherited the company that made those blue paper towels, and shortly after the Arab oil embargo, due to poor financial planning, he went bankrupt. With no responsibilities in the towel business he turned to what really interested…