Fiction

Recommendation: Alexai grew up and still lives in a Chicago neighborhood known as Pilsen/Little Village. It’s the largest barrio east of L.A. The neighborhood is the locus of Mexican culture in the Midwest. It is plagued by the usual economic problems that plague most immigrations, and in particular by street gangs. What attracts me to…

Recommendation: Jeff Parker has taken two fiction workshops with me at St. Petersburg Summer Literary Seminars in Russia. I have enjoyed and admired his humorous, absurdist stories, written with a light touch, easy-going sentences, yet with a great deal of discipline and compactness. In a playful attitude, he manages to develop drama and to render…

The intervention is not Marilyn’s idea, but it might as well be. She is the one who has talked too much. And she has agreed to go along with it, nodding and murmuring an all right into the receiver while Sid dozes in front of the evening news. They love watching the news. Things are…

When I was young our winter-wear wouldn’t have permitted anyone to look sexy. The look then was like the inflated figures in a Macy’s parade, puffy and down-stuffed, colorful rubber boots, with pompons on the hats our mothers knitted, matching mittens hanging on yarn from our coat sleeves. Fashion then didn’t have in mind sprinting…

1 September There was nothing outside our town to warn you of its coming. One second you weren’t there and the next you were. It was more than a post office and more than a village, but it had no sprawl, it had no outskirts. The town huddled close together for protection, the desert everyone…

"At last," my husband said, when I had locked up for the night and come to bed. "You knew I would," I said. "But I didn’t know when." Propped up in the recently rented hospital bed, he peered more closely at my chosen book. A novel by Patrick O’Brian. "Wait, no, no," he said. "You…

I was in the kitchen when the FBI arrived. I had no idea who they were at first. Just two guys coming up the front walk. I felt the Watch Tower heading my way, I sensed conversion, vacuum cleaners, rubbery soap in small plastic buckets that could clean anything yet protect the surface. I threw…

i. My wife, Rita, has been having these dreams in which relatives arbitrarily appear and either ask her to get inside something—a car, a slowly moving train, a brightly lit room that seems unattached to any larger structure—or implore her to let them enter a room or some other place, fixed or moveable (an elevator,…

My aunt Leticia could be counted on to explain the family mysteries. She’d forget I didn’t know something and drop it into conversation, or use the occasion of having a fever—or being ill in any way—to let down her defenses and tell me things I hadn’t been told. Sometimes the words flew out of her…