Fiction

  • from Kepler: A Novel

    One day the physician Oberdorfer approached Kepler with a stealthy smile and – could it be? – a wink, and invited him to come on a certain day to the house of Herr Georg Hartmann von Stubenberg, a merchant of the town. Kepler did not know the man, but he went, thinking he was to…

  • from Translations

    Translations is set in a hedge-school, a kind of ad hoc classical academy, in an Irish-speaking community in County Donegal. It is late August 1833, and at this time the British Army is conducting the first Ordnance Survey of Ireland. The two short extracts that follow are from the first half of Act Two. Lieutenant…

  • Salt of the Earth

    Harrison had eaten a fly in spite of himself. Others had bounced off his goggles or his Adam's apple. He hadn't exactly swallowed the bug, but he had a grim hunch that some of the horny parts had found their way down his gullet. He spat, making a sort of Bronx cheer, then slowed and…

  • Double Zero

    First I was 76. We had been assigned numbers to be taped on our helmets, front and back, with masking tape. But on the first morning I lost my number. A cadre member walked down each long file of men, standing in front of one, then the next, then the next, down the line. This…

  • Psalm

    In the car, his immense and hairless hands melding with the steering wheel, David accelerated into the bank of the curve, weight shifting, the outside wheels lifting, giddying him for a moment with gravity's loss, caught as if in a morning dream of flight, his fear giving way to intimations of immortality; not an idea…

  • The Sayings of Mr. Purple

    None of his friends could say what made Purple tick. He had an observable routine, the same as a number of others from the British colony in this Costa Del Sol fishing village cum retirement-tourist village: coffee and red wine to wake up in the morning (1 or 2 in the afternoon) at the Calle…

  • The Right Bread and the Left

    It must have been a lucrative deal with CARE, the Red Cross, U.N.R.A., or was it the Marshall Plan? by which Uncle Jimmis, remembering the old country, sailed from New York with a shipload of flour for the hungry. The occupation had been over for more than two years, but the civil war still regard….