Fiction

The film which rumor has made the dernier cri of this year's festival is finally screened. It begins without credits, challenging the audience from its opening frame. Not only has it been shot in black and white, but the black and white do not occur in usual relationships to one another. There is little grey….

SWEETIES Once when I was very bad and bit several of the Debrosses girls in the afternoon, Madame Debrosse hung a notice round my neck that said, "Watch out, Sophie bites." She told Maman I should be made to wear white gloves like her girls; it is so they will not touch anything dirty in…

from Island Lives Although this memoir honors an Original and only secondarily anatomizes an Adventuress, the fellow traveller will want to know why I wished to kill my father, Philip Turner, who was not even a bad sort. For the answer we must look down my private fork of the Kaplan-Turner genealogy, back to the…

She had first seen him wearing sweat socks bunched down between the first and second toes of each foot to accommodate black rubber thongs. She associated this foot garb vaguely and incorrectly with an Eastern religion. She noticed he was prettier than she. He was nice to her because he was nice, and she imagined…

Only Colors The little green car came down the hill with a natural parabolic kind of grace, like a sandwich cookie rolling down a string someone has stretched from an upstairs window to the corner of a garage. Only, who was wading barefoot in a stream as wide as a sidewalk that ran along the…

"To dream with one eye open. . . ." Santayana Sometimes the three of them would awaken simultaneously and lie still under the pique coverlets, watching the light seep through the curtains until they were suffused. Or close their eyes against the light, remembering and reinventing. There was, of course, no way to prove the…

I am a fictional character. However, you would be in error to smile smugly, feeling ontologically superior. For you are a fictional character, too. All my readers are except one who is, properly, not reader but author. I am a fictional character; this is not, however, a work of fiction, no more so than any…

On the day that his brother Nachman died, Nathan Malkin, a wealthy sixty-four year old American, was walking along the beach of a nature sanctuary in Israel. He did not find out about his brother's death until three days later, when he returned to his home in Ein Karem, a small village near Jerusalem, and…

I used to dislike shopping, the rushing to too many stores, all the details to remember. Now it's almost pleasant. I shop in the morning when the stores are uncrowded and the early light gleams off the beige brick and glass of the store-fronts. Since Joshua and Miriam are grown and gone, there's less to…