Rain chewed fresh gullies in the ridge road, turning the hard clay dirt to a yellow paste. The ditch overflowed and gray air blurred the low horizon. Dripping tree leaves hung limp and heavy, aimed at the ground. "It'll pass," Mercer said. Coe lit a cigarette and opened the pickup's window an inch. Pellets of…
On his first day at the new job, Joe Frisch was assigned a Haitian woman. Frisch, a refugee himself from grad school, sat at one of a dozen identical metal desks in the Boston office of the Department of Public Welfare, while his new boss hovered over him with one buttock on the desktop: Gillooley,…
Mr. Lee. as he transferred chicken feed from the large bin to his everyday pitcher, noticed how the dust rose from the seeds, how steam rises from a landscape, cold, or hot from a white cup of café con leche, how smoke rises from a casual backyard fire, how a soul is given up from…
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…
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