[Fiction] | Loyalty, by Charles Baxter As much as I love her, I blame Astrid. Astrid told my wife, Corinne, that she could achieve happiness if only she’d leave me. It sounded simple. “Leave that guy, walk out that door, you’ll achieve happiness, you’ll be free.” Achieve happiness. Now there’s a phrase. I stood in the driveway. Holding on to my son, I walked into the garage. Astrid thought that happiness was within poor Corinne’s grasp, and she said so, day after day. Corinne had been bitching about me, to me, and the topics were, I don’t know, the usual. But I loved her, and she left me. The minute Corinne was gone, Astrid showed up. She was competent and assured with child rearing, calm in the face of infant tantrums. New toys appeared. You are currently viewing this article as a guest.
Kazuo Ishiguro - Wikipedia English author Sir Kazuo Ishiguro OBE FRSA FRSL (; born 8 November 1954) is a British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and moved to Britain in 1960 when he was five. In 2017, the Swedish Academy awarded Ishiguro the Nobel Prize in Literature, describing him in its citation as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".[1] Early life[edit] Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, on 8 November 1954, the son of Shizuo Ishiguro, a physical oceanographer, and his wife, Shizuko.[2] At the age of five,[3] Ishiguro and his family left Japan and moved to Guildford, Surrey, as his father was invited for research at the National Institute of Oceanography (now the National Oceanography Centre).[2][4][5] He did not return to visit Japan until 1989, nearly 30 years later, when he was a participant in the Japan Foundation Short-Term Visitors' Program. Awards[edit]
About Her and the Memories That Belong to Her | Mieko Kawakami | Granta Magazine Translated from Japanese by Hitomi Yoshio If we think of our memories as having a shape, then one possibility is that they come in the shape of a box. I know that this is not entirely an original idea, but that doesn’t make it untrue. So I should feel no shame in imagining an ordinary box in which our memories are enclosed. And so it happened that one day a box was delivered to me. I don’t know why I decided to attend the reunion in my rural home town, where there was not a single person I wanted to see or remember, no one I had anything to say to. It could have been that I was curious, or that I happened to have time on my hands. For the occasion, I had purchased a black Balenciaga jacket that I’d been eyeing, and paired it with jeans, Manolo Blahnik heels and an Yves Saint Laurent handbag from a few seasons ago. These were the thoughts I toyed with as I set off one Saturday in late April just before the holidays, taking the bullet train to the town whose name I had long forgotten.
Where Have All the Sundays Gone? - Words Without Borders I was lying in bed when I learned of the novelist's death. Awaking from a long dream filled only with incoherent darkness, my mind was still a blur as I reached out for my iPhone next to the pillow to check the time. As my eyes rested on the little screen, I found the news in the Top Stories section. It was a single sentence made up of tiny characters. I understood the words but couldn't quite grasp the meaning. The novelist had apparently been in treatment for some time. It was early evening when I finally got out of bed. I owned every book the novelist had written. I set the timer on the rice cooker and sat down on the sofa, glancing at the bookshelf to see which one of his books I would hold in my hands. I was down to the last teabag. "Yeah, it's pretty good." We were classmates in high school. From that point on, Amamiya would lend me books by the novelist whose name I had only heard of. Soon, it wasn't enough to talk at school every day. Today was Tuesday. Two o’clock came.
“As You Would Have Told It to Me (Sort Of) If We Had Known Each Other Before You Died” | The New Yorker Audio: Jonas Hassen Khemiri reads. I remember that it was fall. And that it was a weekend. Around lunchtime the doorbell rang. The police stormed in; the hall was filled with uniforms. In the elevator down I stopped resisting. The red-haired policeman led me to a patrol car. The policeman, who until now had looked indifferent, suddenly got a little smile on his lips. The “policeman” opened the door to the back seat. I imagined that we would start with a champagne picnic. I waited in the back seat of the patrol car. After the park we do that thing I heard a colleague saying on the phone that her sister had to do for her bachelorette party. Next stop: the recording studio, where I have to do the thing that my dentist told me his son got for a bachelor-party present—record a song for my future wife. And it really did. I sat there in the back seat and thought that they were either real police who did this on the side or crazy-good actors. After the interrogation I was taken to my “cell.”
Charles Baxter (author) Charles Baxter (born May 13, 1947) is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. Baxter was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to John and Mary Barber (Eaton) Baxter. He graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul. In 1974 he received his PhD in English from the University at Buffalo with a thesis on Djuna Barnes, Malcolm Lowry, and Nathanael West. Baxter taught high school in Pinconning, Michigan for a year before beginning his university teaching career at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He then moved to the University of Michigan, where for many years he directed the Creative Writing MFA program. The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot (2007). Imaginary Paintings (1989)The South Dakota Guidebook (1974)Chameleon (1970) A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations (2004)Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life (2001)Best New American Voices 2001 (2001)The Business of Memory (1999) Greasley, Philip A. (2001).
The Faery Handbag | Small Beer Press by Kelly Link Fri 1 Jul 2005 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Short Stories | 14 Comments "The Faery Handbag" was originally published in the anthology The Faery Reel. I used to go to thrift stores with my friends. We’d take the train into Boston, and go to The Garment District, which is this huge vintage clothing warehouse. We had this theory that you could learn how to tell, just by feeling, what color something was. One time we were looking through kid’s t-shirts and we found a Muppets t-shirt that had belonged to Natalie in third grade. Maybe you’re wondering what a guy like Jake is doing in The Garment District with a bunch of girls. We had this theory that things have life cycles, the way that people do. Down in the basement at the Garment Factory they sell clothing and beat-up suitcases and teacups by the pound. The faery handbag: It’s huge and black and kind of hairy. Fairies live inside it. Grandmother Zofia said it was a family heirloom. "Okay, Zofia," I whispered. "Why not?
“The Lost Troop” Audio: Will Mackin reads. We had a dry spell in Logar. It was December and the weather was dog shit, so a degree of slowness was expected. I thought of the Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima, who, when their island fell to the Americans, didn’t know that it had fallen. I wondered if, one night, we’d drop out of the starry sky in our blacked-out helicopters and land near a walled compound in the desert. But, as far as we knew, it wasn’t. “Come on,” Hal would say. He’d be standing in the middle of the room. One night, Digger spoke up: “Who remembers that graveyard decorated like a used-car lot, out in Khost?” I raised my hand, along with a few others. “I think we might need to go back there,” Digger said. The graveyard in question was on the northern rim of a dusty crater. Digger, who’d been closer to the graveyard than I was, thought that the graves had looked suspicious. “Styrofoam balls,” he suggested to us in the ops hut, “painted to look like stones, then glued to a plywood sheet.”
“Tenth of December” The pale boy with unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs and cublike mannerisms hulked to the mudroom closet and requisitioned Dad’s white coat. Then requisitioned the boots he’d spray-painted white. Painting the pellet gun white had been a no. That was a gift from Aunt Chloe. Every time she came over he had to haul it out so she could make a big stink about the woodgrain. Today’s assignation: walk to pond, ascertain beaver dam. Blam! They were Netherworlders. Safe inside the rock wall, the shot one would go, Guys, look at my butt. As a group, all would look at Gzeemon’s butt, exchanging sullen glances of: Gzeemon shall indeed be limping for the next nine million years, poor bloke. Because yes: Nethers tended to talk like that guy in “Mary Poppins.” Which naturally raised some mysteries as to their origin here on Earth. Detaining him was problematic for the Nethers. Later, imagining them in their death throes, taking pity on them, he would come back, move the rock. All suited up now, NASA. Nice?
Finnuala Fiesta — The Creative Process And it's something every writer carries in them in their heart.Carries–it's a big statement, but there's a small truthwithin the kernel of it–carries the history, the geography, the rulesand the songs of the place they come from. It's inescapable.And to throw it away or to lose it is a tragedy.And to throw it away is a crime. So, for all my complaints about my native land, I am glad to be in thereon that busbecause it was a lovely thing to have.There are a lot of them driving that bus.I'm just one of the passengers.–EDNA O’BRIEN Finnuala Fiesta was as unpredictable as the weather. Her bodywork was splotched with carbuncular eruptions, some of which had burst open revealing the cancerous rust, Neil Young’s eternal insomniac, eating away at her, one crumbly orangey flake at a time. The blisters were O’Dwyer’s fault. Finnuala chewed up the cassettes, copies he’d made from the vinyl at home. The car was a write-off. It was a closed coffin funeral. “Are you sure you want to be doing that?”
Hunters in the Snow--Tobias Wolff Hunters in the Snow by Tobias Wolff Approximate Word Count: 5952 Tub had been waiting for an hour in the falling snow. He paced the sidewalk to keep warm and stuck his head out over the curb whenever he saw lights approaching. One driver stopped for him but before Tub could wave the man on he saw the rifle on Tub's back and hit the gas. The fall of snow thickened. A truck slid around the corner, horn blaring, rear end sashaying. A truck had stopped several feet beyond where Tub had been standing. The man beside him smiled and looked off. "You almost ran me down," Tub said. "Come on, Tub, said the man beside the driver. Tub took the bolt out of his rifle and climbed in beside him. "Tub, you haven't done anything but complain since we got here," said the man in the middle. Some juvenile delinquents had heaved a brick through the windshield on the driver's side, so the cold and snow tunneled right into the cab. "Another thing," Kenny said. "I'm cold," Tub said. Frank breathed out. "What?"
- Chapter 18 Back | NextContents by Isaac Asimov Preface by David DrakeThe term "pulp" tends to be used as a synonym for any magazine that isn't printed on slick (coated) paper, but it has a more technical meaning also: a magazine measuring seven inches by ten inches, printed on coarse (pulp) paper. The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of Multivac. Multivac was self-adjusting and self-correcting. For decades, Multivac had helped design the ships and plot the trajectories that enabled man to reach the Moon, Mars, and Venus, but past that, Earth's poor resources could not support the ships. But slowly Multivac learned enough to answer deeper questions more fundamentally, and on May 14, 2061, what had been theory, became fact. The energy of the sun was stored, converted, and utilized directly on a planet-wide scale. "That's not forever."
Understand - a novelette by Ted Chiang I'm in the middle of retouching a holograph when the phone rings. I waver between the phone and the console, and reluctantly opt for the phone. I'd normally have the answering machine take any calls when I'm editing, but I need to let people know I'm working again. "Hey Leon, it's Jerry." "Hi Jerry. "You interested in seeing a movie tonight? "Tonight? "What's that?" "It's called Symplectic. "Is this some kind of Shakespearean soliloquy?" Too much: with that lighting, the outer edges will be too bright. "I didn't know you were such a fan of poetry." After checking all the numbers once more, I let the computer recalculate the interference pattern. "Thanks, but I think we'll stick with the movie." "Okay, you guys have fun. Suddenly it occurs to me what's just happened. Will the surprises never end? And now I find I can concentrate on two things at once; something I never would have predicted. The Neurologist-in-Chief, Dr. He's asked me into his office to have a talk. What an inane question.
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