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Acorns

Josip Novakovich — Mon, 24 May 2010 22:27:02 -0700

While the JFK Terminal One loudspeakers announced the last call for the nonstop to Frankfurt, John hugged his wife, Mara Tadic. “Are you really sure you want to go?” he said. “Dozens of journalists have been killed there.”

“No interpreters, as far as I know.”

His parting kiss slipped past her mouth and brushed her downy cheek.

Mara slid out of his embrace. “Don’t forget tuna for Leo!”

On the plane Mara sat next to a Baptist missionary on her way to join her husband in Tirana.

“You want to convert them?” Mara said. “Most Albanians are Muslim.”

“There are quite a few Christians among them. Are you trying to convert me into not converting people?”

“Touché.”

Memorable Days

James Salter and Robert Phelps — Sat, 22 May 2010 00:17:21 -0700

In late 1969 James Salter received a long, admiring fan letter about his novel A Sport and a Pastime, which had been published two years earlier. The letter was from Robert Phelps, and it prompted a friendship and a correspondence that continued for years. In any era their letters would have been remarkable for their wit, their brio, their love, and in our era of rapid communications, the letters are especially remarkable for their depth, the sense of dwelling fully in each moment so that nothing essential is lost. Salter once observed that the goal in writing is to give the reader aesthetic pleasure on each page, and in this back-and-forth between great friends, the pleasure comes in every line.

Just Before War

David Rabe — Sat, 15 May 2010 17:16:14 -0700

“Fisher here,” says the voice over the phone.

“Hello,” Whitaker says.

“Yes, please.”

“May I speak to Sharon?”

“May I ask who is calling, please?”

“I’m Joe Whitaker.”

“Sharon’s married now, you know.”

“Yeah, I heard that.”

“I’m her husband, Bob Fisher, Joe. Could I take a message? Sharon’s in the shower.”

“Oh.”

“Is there a message?”

“I’m just an old friend is all and I’m in the army and I’ve got to ship out next week, a week from today, as a matter of fact . . . overseas . . . Vietnam . . . , actually. So I just thought it might be nice if I could say hello. I’d like to meet you, too. I’ve been in town all day.”

By Hand

James Salter — Tue, 11 May 2010 00:39:54 -0700

“Charisma” arrived at our offices in handwritten draft pages as James Salter worked on a new story, which he would give a premiere reading of at Narrative Night, San Francisco, 2010. He gave an arresting performance and then continued to revise the story into its final form. Below are the original handwritten pages, followed by the typed revisions, offering a view of the writer at work.

Reading from Life Is Meals

James and Kay Salter — Sat, 08 May 2010 21:17:09 -0700

Jim and Kay read from Life Is Meals at the Narrative Night in Denver, January 2007. With warmth and humor, they read sections of the book and described how they started cooking together and began the book. Great raconteurs, Jim and Kay share their wit and grace with us in the anecdotes here.

VIDEO

From Life Is Meals (15:19)

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By Hand

Benjamin Alire Sáenz — Thu, 06 May 2010 13:54:55 -0700

William Styron once remarked that he wrote by hand because his mind didn’t move faster than his hand. Writing is physical. Writing that embodies characters, that lyrically inflects to express emotions and states of being, that offers images and sensations, that rhythmically creates time, that quickens the heart and mind of the reader, requires the focused presence of the whole person who puts the words on the page. The acceleration of modernity, from the typewriter to the word processor and now to digital media, potentially weakens the link between the body and soul of literature. So, as a visual reminder that handwriting has an eloquence of its own, from time to time we are presenting handwritten drafts and typed pages revised by hand by some of our authors.

Savior Games

Cori Jones — Wed, 05 May 2010 15:36:56 -0700

Saturday night

is my blessing; it makes me stick to my plan. I go down to Southville after dark, when the walls in my place look too yellow and the air stinks of stale grease and dust. I cut across the boulevard, through alleyways between dusky stores, across the parking lot next to the all-night lanes. And then I’m on South Street, moving through neon and gold, past clubs and peep shows and bars. Behind the bus station Jake’s waiting for me in his car. I slide in next to him, sit as close as I can. We glide toward the warehouses, the interstate, the used-car lots inside barbed-wire fences. You owe me, he always says. Don’t you forget. He gives me what I need, and I let him do what he wants. But I never take him home with me, not Jake. I never let him spend the night. Only Michael can spend the night. Michael lived for a while in Montana, but he said his roots are here. He said he and his wife were happy in Missoula, but out there the drop-offs are steep. One night three years ago she drove right through a guardrail. After he’d given all her things away he took off for Patagonia and didn’t come back for a year. “Have you ever tried,” he asked me once, “to run to the bottom of the Earth?”

Every Good Marriage Begins in Tears

Katie Chase — Wed, 05 May 2010 15:33:40 -0700

At the vodka stand the girl tilts the bottle, pouring into paper cups. Hair falls before her face. Her skin looks raw from the cool spring air. Shaky, unsure, she spills a little on the counter. The red-nosed man waiting for his drink cries, “I’m not paying for that! Go on, fill it up, to the top!”

I try to meet her eyes to offer a kind smile, but even as it comes my turn and I order a shot, take it down, and receive my change from the older girl she works beside, she doesn’t look up once. She’s already used to pushy, alcoholic men, and she’s not easy.

“Another for you?” The older girl’s voice is nasal and insistent.

I shake my head but linger. The liquor balances the weight in my chest. I feel light. The mussiness of the girl’s dark falling hair reminds me of my brother’s wife, Zarina, but the girl is shy, and with her look of serious concentration, she’s nothing like her.

“Is this your young sister?” I ask. “You worked alone before.”

“She’s in training. Our father plans to open another stand.”

“Is vodka a good business?”

“Excuse me?” She’s getting impatient, so I order another shot and tip it back.

A. Roolette? A. Roolette?

Adam Prince — Wed, 05 May 2010 15:31:04 -0700

On April 18 at the Yarley-Woodward Country Club, we hold our fiftieth reunion. Seventy-three attend, half our original number. “Half,” we tell each other, proud of our longevity. “Half,” we say, to explain how important our identity as the South Pasadena High School Class of ’57 has always been. Waiting at the entrance are name tags that include our senior class photographs. We wear them good-humoredly, chuckling and shaking our heads at those former selves as we might at a kitten pouncing a sock.

The men of ’57 are broad in neck and chest and gut, with heads that bulge from buttoned collars like fingertips from tightly wrapped Band-Aids. Our faces, already pink with age, have gone sheepish red as the result of complaints we’d been making only fifteen minutes earlier about coming to this thing—complaints nearly forgotten now as we greet our equally hot-faced friends. We wear navy blue or gray sport coats; our ties are tasteful and subdued, except in the case of Class President Jerry Riggs, who sports a yellow tie with the word Viagra repeated hundreds of times in capitalized blue. And then there is John Mink, a small, chalky man who has just been saying to his young wife in the car that this ought to be a nice event but who now stands apart, ungreeted, running his hands over the jacket of his five-thousand-dollar black tailored suit as if to smooth it beyond what is possible.

Untitled

Wang Wei — Wed, 05 May 2010 12:55:16 -0700

Art

Shirley Kaufman — Wed, 05 May 2010 12:53:17 -0700

Turner had himself tied
to the mast of a ship
to experience a storm at sea.

Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan — Tue, 04 May 2010 14:21:36 -0700

Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco in the 1970s. She arrived after the ’60s had run their course, and only haunting leftovers caught her observant adolescent eye. In an article written for the magazine This Old House, Egan wrote, “Addled hippies in rainbow-knit caps playing bongos in Golden Gate Park, smells of pot and incense wafting in the air, and a deep stillness to the city, as if it were slowly coming to after a sharp conk on the head. I could almost hear the echoes of the wild parade I’d missed.” San Francisco’s legacy of acid rock and teenage runaways provides provenance for several characters in Egan’s remarkable new book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, a finely braided meditation on time, memory, pop culture, and the perils of growing up in America.

Vestibule

Chase Twichell — Sun, 02 May 2010 21:12:25 -0700

What etiquette holds us back
from more intimate speech,
especially now, at the end of the world?

The Morning

W. S. Merwin — Sun, 02 May 2010 21:09:32 -0700

The first morning
I woke in surprise to your body

Starlight

Ted Kooser — Sun, 02 May 2010 21:07:14 -0700

Sherwood Anderson and Rick Moody

Sherwood Anderson and Rick Moody — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:54:14 -0700

Rick Moody’s story “The Double Zero” was written as an intentional updating of Sherwood Anderson’s classic tale “The Egg,” published in 1920. Anderson and Moody make a perfect pairing in terms of inspiration and influences. Anderson’s work, particularly his collection Winesburg, Ohio, describes the moral crisis and psychic disruption of small-town America making the transition from agriculture to industry. Half a century later Moody’s novels chronicle the moral dystopia of suburban America. Moody, in an email exchange with Paul Vidich, offered some thoughts on influences.

Promise

Laura Jamison — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:49:48 -0700

Terri stood on the porch, waiting for her long-ago boyfriend Alex, or his wife, Renee, to answer the door. The neighborhood looked a lot like the one they’d all grown up in, about sixty miles west, with rows of identical tract homes, tidy shrubs, and the occasional rusted-out car up on blocks in the driveway.

Footsteps: someone was coming. Did the late-afternoon sun expose the lines in her face, she wondered, or did it light up her eyes? Why do you care, she scolded herself.

Why had she come?

The door swung open, and a little old man, short and wiry, appeared.

No—not an old man. It was Alex.

Where Is My Boy?

Aggie Zivaljevic — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 12:02:39 -0700

Boyan, Deutschemark, Mosquito, and Jumbo, four boys from the gang Vucko, couldn’t wait for the war to begin so that they wouldn’t have to go to middle school. They had named their gang after the little wolf mascot of the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. The boys lived next to the airport, in the Dobrinja suburb, built to house foreign athletes and journalists during the Games. Afterward, the city converted the buildings into luxury apartments.

In the early spring of 1992, melting snow revealed plastic bags and shreds of paper stuck in the barren bushes. The wind blew across the back alleys, and old garbage emerged all over the former Olympic Village. Boyan, the leader, had just gotten a new pair of Nike tennis shoes and was kicking up dust on Mitsubishi Avenue on his way to Vucko’s meeting.

Typhoon

Anthony Marra — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:59:41 -0700

The girl wiped her father’s forehead with a cotton rag. The fabric was stippled with gray at each point of perspiration, and the girl refolded the rag and brought it down the bridge of his nose. Several times he moaned loudly, as if sending a distress signal from beyond the border of consciousness, but the girl paid no mind, and her father did not wake up. Through the window the girl watched a breaker roll in languidly, its last breath a sputter of sea foam against the sand. His sallow skin looked incandescent in the midday light, and the girl continued to blot the perspiration from his forehead. Sweat droplets pooled between his closed eyelid and cheekbone and when he turned his head, the thimbleful of moisture fell down his face. The girl wiped it from his cheek before refolding the rag and shaking his arm. He swatted her hand away and began snoring. She knew he would wake soon.

Four Poems

Dan Gerber — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 13:51:57 -0700

Arthropods

You don’t have to love them,
I said to that part of myself
that wants the world clean,
without itching, crawling, buzzing,
or death,
feeling I wasn’t doing much harm,