Fiction

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…

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…

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…

from his apartment on Ferrell Anderson Place he liked to walk down to the quai which the local inhabitants referred to as The Reiser for reasons Carl was not able to determine but he somehow always lost his way on the way and found himself in a puzzle of winding and oblique streets complicated intersections…

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….

Mrs. Endsley was paid to keep everyone happy. Her latest project involved composing a Conwoody Convalescent song, something on the order of a school song, but with some of the parts left out. And it was in her line of duty that, on a Wednesday in early May, just before supper, she smacked her little…

Almost overnight the summer had disappeared. The morning I was to leave for the cottage and meet Peter there was a damp, north wind, and constellations of leaves flattened on the sidewalk two stories below seemed strangely three-dimensional. I wasn't sure if I were staring or looking. I had been thinking about one of my…

Hello my little bluegill, little shark face. Fanged one, sucker, hermaphrodite. Rose, bloom in the fog of the body; see how the gulls arch over us, singing their raucous squalls. They bring you sweet meats, tiny mice, spiders with clasped legs. In their old claws, claws of eons, reptilian sleep, they cradle shiny rocks and…

"Kitty Kushner's dying," Winters' wife said on the phone. "You'd better get right over." He sighed. Last week it had been a rape in the next block and, before that, two divorces in the Political Science Department. He looked up from his lecture notes on "Heuristic Programming and Artificial Intelligence," and settled the receiver on…