Fiction

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…

It was her second marriage and Karen sat at the round table in Marblehead with her new family, listening to their conversation and thinking of what her first husband would see, if he was there. He would notice, she thought, my new mother-in-law's enormous diamond, and he would see this new father-in-law's yachting jacket, and…

(from a novel to be called: Nothing Happens in Carmincross) Below them is the sweep of the valley, widening from nothing in the grey-brown mountains down to deep green pasture-land. The river winds in the most approved style. The farmhouses are square and white and solid. No poverty in this part of the world. Never…

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…

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…

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…

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…

They were out coursing on Sunday a last time together but they did not know it, the two friends, James Sharkey and Tom Lennon, a teacher and an agricultural instructor. The weak winter sun had thawed the fields soft enough to course the hare on, and though it still hung blood-orange above the hawthorns on…