Fiction

  Every village has its rhythm, and every year Templeton’s was the same. Summer meant tourists to the baseball museum, the crawl of traffic down Main Street, even a drunken soprano flinging an aria into the night on her stagger back to the Opera. With fall, the tourists thinned out, and the families of Phillies…

Hank says: "Pan Am is run by the CIA, you know." He says: "There’s trouble brewing here. Out there." He points with his chin. "In the sugar cane fields. In the jungle." He says: "Hemingway knows. He knows all about it." Clara says nothing. She is thinking that she can’t even get this one thing…

1. Georgetown, Great Exuma. Two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in the Chat and Chill Bar on Stocking Island. KB, the Bahamian who owns the place, is looking for an argument and can’t find one. Mandela versus Boutelayzee, University of Chicago versus Harvard, chanterelles versus portabellas. Even Mushroom John, who brought his wife, Sandy, down…

    For what did one raise these children? For what did one labor and heave and suffer reconstructive surgery; for what did one feed and clothe and coax and school, raising them from sitting to standing to making their own money, if not for their well-deserved gratitude? It was work, it was a lot…

The man I learn from drives us from carnival to carnival in a Chrysler hearse with a convertible top. In Futura Bold, it says Theobold’s Body Shop. He is a man in his mid-forties—trousers, all of expensive cotton; shirts of silk. He has a different pair of soft-leather boots for every day of the month….

On her first day at the American school, Glynnis’s class dissects earthworms. At her old school, the fourth graders dissected cow eyes that came delivered in a plastic jug. But here, the worms aren’t delivered. After lunch, the class has to find their own worms in the mud outside, then rinse them off under the…

There was a storm— Nearly seven years ago— Julia and Lucas, living in California, they didn’t live together. She lived in her space, he in his. Lucas was finishing a degree at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, biding time; they were going to move to L.A. soon and get a place together. She was…

  a novel excerpt It was a long road which he walked, and as it was the end of the dry season it was hot and dusty, and the heat rose from the orange laterite soil in simmered waves. Along the road to Boda there were palm trees and ebony and mango and papaya trees,…

In September of 1965, when I was eighteen years old, I traveled from London, England, where I was living, to Hamburg, West Germany, with my friend Carl Jurgen Kurtz. Carl was twenty. We’d met at a boarding house in Chelsea I’d lived in for a few weeks after I’d first arrived in London, and where…