Fiction

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…

One day, waiting for a bus, standing on a street corner in Lower Manhattan, somewhere near Canal, having completed jury duty, having in fact judged another human being and found him guilty, she thought of justice, that heavy word. As a member of the general worldwide mothers’ union, she had watched the man’s mother. She…

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…

There were a bunch of us who had drawn together into a corner of the dining room. It was a big party, and none of us had met before. But a tiny core of women of a certain age had drawn more women until there were enough of us that we needed to be democratic…

The shepherd is perched on a stile, one eye on his paper, one eye on the lane below the ffridd, the meadow, beyond the flock. His dogs lie at his feet, their heads between their paws, panting softly in the unseasonably warm May weather and batting their ears occasionally at the horseflies attracted to the…

Andrew Byar began his experiment in the garden, going out in the dusky evenings after the help had dispersed for the day, after the cook had served the last meal and washed the china and departed to catch the final trolley, after the gardener had arranged the tools in a gleaming, orderly progression against the…

So all right, thought Peterson, he was speaking English, and, all right, so the map was from America. Well, naturally. And so, all right, the names of towns were spelled differently here and pronounced differently. But come on, hadn’t this country been open to tourism for at least ten years? "C-h-i-n-k-o," said Peterson, pronouncing the…

"You shouldn’t play with fire." Lena leans over Ivan’s shoulder and blows out the votive candle over which he is passing his index finger back and forth. She jiggles her arm nervously, and the silver bracelet slides beneath her sleeve. She looks around her. Everywhere there is plenty. The people are fat. How can some…