Fiction

He wanted, above all, to crack The New Yorker. He could not deal in the right things, a lorgnette, an Italian garden, a grandmother, Mexico. Mexico is perfect because it is a proximate paradise. Situations come undone without the vexation that Europe can sometimes bring. The New Yorker watches for mise en scene. You feel…

It was one of those pearl-soft days when the sky drifts in broken ridges of gray. I was on my way up the coast, planning to winter over in one of the waterfront towns on the eastern shore of Vancouver Island. It was mid-November. I had been out since early spring. I hoped to find…

The woman across the street bends over to pull a weed from her front steps. I set a fresh cup of coffee on the Help Wanted section and watch from my second-story kitchen window. She is married to a surgeon. It's a two-Mercedes family. She and the surgeon have two daughters. One married a lawyer…

Gropius and I came to America in 1937 from England. We had been in London on a Leave of Absence permit from the German government and it was by no means certain that we would be allowed to return to claim our belongings, which were at the time in Berlin in care of my sister….

There is a child sitting next to me on this ratty old train, and he is more or less mine. Anyone watching us would not think us an unlikely pair. A young woman travelling with a seven year old kid. Her son, they would assume. I'm old enough, though I never can believe that I…

A group of us were sitting around trying to think of nice things to say about my grandfather. He had died at ten o'clock that morning. So there we all were, gathered in my parents' living room. There was my mother, of course, She was Grandpa Jack's eldest child. And my father. And my mother's…

We didn't know he was dead until after the Gala was over. It was a small college-town fundraiser for the Opera Association, and it was held on the stage of the college theater – on the stage itself, so that we could see the control booth, located at the rear of the auditorium, up where…

Her grandmother would put on her glasses to read labels when the girl went to the market with her. The grandmother would read the brand name and the price out loud to the girl. The girl could not read much herself, but sometimes she pretended she could. The grandmother would read a word, and the…

Katie had already made plans to go to Texas with the baby. Her going didn't have anything to do with Fisher hitting her. On the other hand, she wouldn't change her plans, even though her eyes were black in the morning; even though he cried and said he'd sat up all night in remorse, thinking…