Eudora loved her life. She had been sober three years and nicotine-free for two and a half. She had not quit her necessary day job. She had not stayed involved with an abusive boyfriend. She had made love to a man who became her best friend and never again her lover. Her weight was right, …
The Canadian comes to us with blue-black eyes and a forehead like the cliffs of Santorini. We think that he is Greek, but the Canadian is quick to correct us. He is Jewish, and he is standing in my doorway, and he wants to know the way to Giorgos’s taverna. Yianni looks the Canadian up …
My husband wanted to go to a minor-league hockey game. You mean, before you die? I asked. No, he said, tonight, there’s a game tonight, I want to go to a minor- league hockey game tonight. It seemed a dumb thing to want to do. But in our marriage vows we had sworn that we …
Our drummer wants to know how our spirits are. He’s the only one who thinks we’ll make it. Our drummer sees light, swears the storm’s over. Our drummer, the embodiment of the world’s worst cover of Sublime’s “What I Got,” pleads with us: “This is nothing—dudes, this is nothing!” The van’s gray upholstering droops down …
Artist’s Statement My focus is on the beauty and enigma of light and color. I crave beauty, and work to reduce the visual to utter simplicity. My paintings embody a dynamic between being fully realized abstract paintings and remaining arrested gestures in a state of undoneness. Making paintings is a process of accumulating observations. The …
Be Recorder. Carmen Giménez Smith. Graywolf, 2019. 88 pp. $16.00 (paper). Grief Sequence. Prageeta Sharma. Wave Books, 2019. 104 pp. $20.00 (paper). Dear Delinquent. Ann Townsend. Sarabande, 2019. 72 pp. $15.95 (paper). More and more, our lives are built around a persona we skillfully weave on social media. It doesn’t matter what you do for …
The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion. Sonja Livingston. University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 184 pp. $17.95 (paper). As a vehicle for exploration, the spiritual memoir gives us two worlds, one of facts and things and one of the transcendent; its work is in demonstrating how to pass from the one to the other, …
Literary Nonfiction Editor Kristen Iversen: In “Specs,” Ismael Rodriguez gives us a powerful and compassionate essay about family, inheritance, and the fragile, imperfect bond between father and son. He examines the weaknesses and shortcomings of family—especially fathers—and how they shape the narrator, as these things shape us all. Rich with vivid details of character and …
Convenience Store Woman. Sayaka Murata. Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori. Grove, 2018. 176 pp. $20.00 (cloth). Convenience Store Woman is a short volume that fits in hand, purse, or satchel and can be sneaked out and read in little bursts, as quick as popping a Tic Tac. I have read it three or four times, …
Undermajordomo Minor. Patrick deWitt. Ecco, 2015. 336 pp. $26.99 (cloth). And a related question, perhaps more useful: what is the relationship between occupation and genre? Somebody needed to rustle up a herd or two of cattle before Owen Wister could write The Virginian. Dashiell Hammett’s objective narration in The Maltese Falcon would be awfully dry …