The last time this type of celestial event was visible from Earth was more than seven hundred years ago. The Dark Ages. Dante was at work on the Commedia, writing in the mornings, breaking at noon to masturbate and have his tea, then back at his desk until dusk. King Philip IV ordered the kidnapping…
She was wiping the counter down for closing when he came and seated himself on a stool, asking for pie and coffee. There was nothing special about that, nothing special about him. He was in working clothes, a heavy cloth jacket, gray to begin with, and blackened now at the elbows and cuffs. He didn’t…
for L.S.K.V. “I’m gonna kill you,” Gina says in my ear as our camp counselor, Eunice, shows us around. “Tonight, in your sleep. If I haven’t killed myself first.” I shrug Gina off. “It’s one week. We’ll survive.” Secretly, though, I’m dying inside. Nothing I’ve read or seen on TV ever suggested that US summer…
Chicago, 1960 In the big old Nordling house near the university, at the far end of the long, tall living room, there was a baby grand piano. The piano was next to an open window with gauze curtains that almost reached the floor. Astrid Nordling was standing behind them, hiding from the grown-ups sitting over…
It was only June, but Steven Darby knew his summer was already gone. He waited with the men at the crest of the ravine. Down in the basin, a brook swept past old bathing pools, beneath a rotted footbridge and a crumbling, stone pump house, to follow the declination of the land south into the…
The lobby was a crunch of necessary blues, blues from a lifetime, blues stored up and colonized. On the floor-length, brocade drapes, silver vines and chrysanthemums crawled on a pale blue background. The walls were painted throttled midnight blue. Blue Oriental rugs tic-tac-toed across the floor. Two nearly purple wall lamps glimmered, and under a…
There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You find in this way the path of your life. —Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table I have cultivated an approach Obviously out of…
Jimmy Ludlow, Senior Class President of the St. Bonaventure High School Class of ’72 and chair of the Silver Reunion Committee, is literally run off his feet. His wife kneels beside him, applying an ice pack to his twisted ankle. Seems he carried too many winter coats in too big a rush across the cafeteria,…
When Josh Cooper met Marybelle Evans he’d been out of the majors for thirty-five years. He’d had a brief, but distinguished, pitching career a thousand miles north in Boston, where he’d won Rookie of the Year in 1972. But that gig had come to an abrupt end in 1973 when he’d tried to fire a…
No products in the cart.