Some people think travel is unsafe. They don’t trust the aeronautic logic of planes, and they think the rest of the earth is more bloody and troubled and roiling than wherever they’re from. I’d never been one of those people, though I taught a course called Patterns of Civic Unrest in the Post-Colonial World…
We were the News-of-the-World Theater Collective, moving from city to city together; we were all married to each other and to the idea of what you could pull from the streams of the news that ran over and around and through our lives. We wanted no one to ever again let that information splash over…
When I was in fifth grade at a private school for boys in Newton, Massachusetts, my geography teacher, Mr. Neale, was blind, had been blind for some years, probably on account of some gradual degenerative disease. This was in 1952. Mr. Neale was a large man, with a round face and thick fleshy ears;…
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,…
Good-looking husky guy six-foot-four in late twenties or early thirties, Caucasian male, as the initial police report will note, he’s solid-built as a fire hydrant, carries himself like an athlete, or an ex-athlete just perceptibly thickening at the waist, otherwise in terrific condition like a bronze figure in motion, sinewy arms pumping as he…
Two and a half weeks after I was born, on July 9th, 1958, the plates that make up the Fairweather Range in the Alaskan panhandle apparently slipped twenty-one feet on either side of the Fairweather fault, the northern end of a major league instability that runs the length of North America. The thinking now…
"Just in time for cocktails!" our mother’s mother, Gran, says, obviously exasperated, coming to meet us out on the drive. We were supposed to be there for lunch. Now, dressed in her cocktail clothes—white pants, a silk smock, gold shoes, and jewelry—after perfunctory kisses hello (she’s irritated) and the quickest sizing up of our mother’s…
When Anna Green walked into the ballroom for the twentieth reunion of Surfview High in Los Angeles, she did not predict that she would fall in love with Warren Vance. She joined her classmates, in their finery, penned by the hotel"s large glass windows, the sky outside black and the cars on the freeways arranged…
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