Margaret Atwood: “Stone Mattress” At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone.
What she had in mind was a vacation, pure and simple. Take a breather, do some inner accounting, shed worn skin. The Arctic suits her: there’s something inherently calming in the vast cool sweeps of ice and rock and sea and sky, undisturbed by cities and highways and trees and the other distractions that clutter up the landscape to the south. Among the clutter she includes other people, and by other people she means men. She’s had enough of men for a while.
But old habits die hard, and it’s not long before she’s casting an appraising eye over her fleece-clad fellow-travellers dithering with their wheely bags in the lobby of the first-night airport hotel. It’s the solitaries who interest her, the lurkers at the fringes. For that evening’s meet-and-greet she chooses her cream-colored pullover, perching the Magnetic Northward nametag just slightly too low on her left breast. “Verna,” he says. “Old-fashioned,” she says. Margaret Atwood. Molly Light returns, oh how simple faith is justified!
I do count on it and anyway there is always hunger, even if it stayed as dark as holes, as coals, as under the sofa, hunger would come back regardless and tell me what to do. The Life Before His Eyes: Reading Tobias Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain" There comes a jarring moment in every reader's life when he connects with an equally profound moment in the writer's life.
Let me start that again.... There comes a jarring moment in every writer's life when he connects with his reader in a moment of earthquake proportions. Invisible Writer meets Invisible Reader, shaking hands with an audible clap of flesh. Tobias Wolff's short story, "Bullet in the Brain" Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.
Copyright © 1995 by Tobias Wolff. First appeared in The New Yorker on Sept. 25, 1995. Anders couldn't get to the bank until just before it closed, so of course the line was endless and he got stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put him in a murderous temper. Last Night. Walter Such was a translator.
He liked to write with a green fountain pen that he had a habit of raising in the air slightly after each sentence, almost as if his hand were a mechanical device. He could recite lines of Blok in Russian and then give Rilke’s translation of them in German, pointing out their beauty. He was a sociable but also sometimes prickly man, who stuttered a little at first and who lived with his wife in a manner they liked. 10 Free Stories by George Saunders, Author of Tenth of December, “The Best Book You’ll Read This Year” For writers and serious readers, George Saunders is anything but a newcomer.
Saunders published his first short story with The New Yorker back in 1992, and his new stories have regularly debuted in the magazine's Fiction section ever since. Over the years, he has gained the reputation of being a "writer's writer," with authors like Tobias Wolff saying about Saunders: “He’s been one of the luminous spots of our literature for the past 20 years.” But despite his literary accomplishments, and despite winning the prestigious MacArthur award in 2006, George Saunders never quite became a household name until January 6 of this year. On that day, The New York Times published an article with the title, "George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year," a pretty bold declaration given that 2013 still had 359 days to go. Since then, Saunders has found himself in the limelight talking about Tenth of December, his newly-published collection of short stories.
Related Content. ‘Tenth of December,’ by George Saunders. I love how this makes Saunders sound like a nervous explorer, crossing thin ice to reach a distant smoldering volcano.
The land of the short story! But it also captures something fundamental about his own brutal, jokey stories, which for all of their linguistic invention and anarchic glee are held together by a strict understanding of the form and its requirements. Take plot. George Saunders (1958-____ ) The Falls by George Saunders (b.1958) Approximate Word Count: 3801 Morse found it nerve-racking to cross the St.
Jude grounds just as the school was being dismissed, because he felt that if he smiled at the uniformed Catholic children they might think he was a wacko or pervert and if he didn't smile they might think he was an old grouch made bitter by the world, which surely, he felt, by certain yardsticks, he was. Sometimes he wasn't entirely sure that he wasn't even a wacko of sorts, although certainly he wasn't a pervert. Morse was tall and thin and as gray and sepulchral as a church about to be condemned. From behind him on the path came a series of arrhythmic whacking steps. Jerome David Salinger. The Laughing Man. Zoetrope: All-Story: Back Issue.