Fiction

Each day she woke before dawn and walked the grounds of the American hospital. She didn’t go far. She kept to the footpaths that encircled the main hall, past the evergreens and the timber cottages now used as additional wards for the wounded. It had once been a Japanese vocational school for the arts, and…

Opening chapter of The Condition, by Jennifer Haigh To be published by HarperCollins in May 2008   Summer comes late to Massachusetts. The gray spring is frosty, unhurried:  wet snow on the early plantings, a cold lesson for optimistic gardeners, for those who have not learned. Chimneys smoke until Memorial Day. Then, all at once,…

Adler, Professor of Rabbinics (Emeritus), was annoyed that the young man sitting next to him was interfering with his sleep. Through slitted eyes he watched him, plugged into his music, listlessly turning the pages of a magazine, giving out somehow all the traits Adler had come to dislike in the young—vanity, narcissism, the insouciant attention…

The following excerpts are from Archangel , a hybrid work that takes as its center the unnamed “monster” in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In Shelley’s book (so very different from the movies) the “monster” learns to read by overhearing cottagers giving lessons to a foreigner. Subsequently he reads many books-including Paradise Lost, Volney’s Ruins of Empire,…

The air outside was warm and wet, like breath. Feeling the breeze on his face, the baby stopped crying and looked up at the sky. I turned him around and leaned him against my chest, holding him with one hand curled under his arms, the other cupping his bottom. He gently kicked his legs, as…

  The men and women of the Causon Creek Church of God with Signs Following were expecting families from congregations all over the South to attend their annual homecoming services, some from hundreds of miles away. Most would cross the Tennessee border from North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky, though a few were coming from states…

A section of the newspaper, rolled into a tight cone and flaming at the top, stuck out of the cook’s ear the first time I saw him. This was early June, in Corpus Christi, Texas, when I was sixteen and had been hired as the delivery driver for La Cocina Mexican Restaurant. The cook was…

She was in her early twenties, five or six years younger than me. She moved with a catlike suppleness through our dull office space (scratchy fabric of cubicle walls, coiled wires, the kitchen with its empty Pepsi cans assembled into a shaky pyramid for future recycling). She wore skirts—nobody in our office wore skirts—short, flared…

Mandy stood in front of the open garage and asked her husband why anybody would ask her over for lunch on a Sunday. Dan was already moving the bicycles, hanging the rakes on a hook, stacking things she didn’t recognize. Maybe this woman wanted to get to know her, be her friend, he said, rolling…