Fiction

Giverny, 1907 Quickly Émile took out the green wooden rowboat to lift fallen leaves off the pond. When Monsieur would come out of the pink stucco house at six in the morning, it had to be just right. With no breeze yet, the water lay like a liquid mirror, and Monsieur would want to paint…

Recommendation: Katherine Bell’s description of what her British post World War II woman finds buried in her backyard—her tiny garden—electrified me, not by what she found but by the delicacy of the description of what she found. A real writer. —Frank Conroy, director of the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and author of…

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…

Lucy calls Greg up as soon as she gets to her office. She was the one who had to run, as soon as the teacher conference was over, who took off out of there like a bat out of hell, heading for her car, leaving Greg to walk more leisurely home, no doubt stopping on…

We have a grandfather somewhere. We don’t know where—I mean, we kiddos don’t. Not anymore. Mostly we remember him at the low house by the lake. Grousing at the black flies, stinking up Nature with the smell of his burning charcoal-and-plum pipe tobacco. A stout figure, like an orator in some senate, he liked to…

“Quick weddings and short marriages are all I know,” I admitted in my interview at June’s Brides, “but I love lace, and I’m capable of telling white lies to brides’ mothers. I was a psych minor, so I know everything is harder than it looks.” I got the job. And for the next few years,…

Jackie Flynn just turned eleven, but he has already spent plenty of time inside the Knickerbocker, a dark smoky barroom where men with rulers in their back pockets drink beer and stare at a soundless TV. Whenever his father goes out to do what he calls "moonlighting," Jackie’s mother insists that Jackie accompany him. She…