You’re seldom suspicious when you’re happy, and so I didn’t realize that the whole awful business was about to start when Vita said, “It’s been ages since you had lunch…

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Crooked November moon. The sky’s belly, torn open. The snow, spilling out and coming down. The first snow. Onto the midnight streets of Moscow. “Ash.” Wind. Flakes. Blizzard, whiteout. “You…

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That night, I was slogging knee-deep in the steely waters, trawling for eels, flashlight taped onto my cap, fishing net dragging behind me, when I snagged on something large and…

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Ina had lost her vision when she was only seventeen. She suffered a high fever due to a malady that had torn through the fiefdom. The entire family fell ill…

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Only Greg ever noticed the notch in my tooth, and only in outline did I tell him about how I got it—how Guin and I stole that couple’s developed film…

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Baumgartner is sitting at his desk in the second-floor room he variously refers to as his study, his cogitorium, and his hole. Pen in hand, he is midway through a…

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can this be i? Actually, I had walked into the hallway and disappeared into the bedroom briefly. Several of them danced and I heard Vida say about me, “He disappeared… 

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Long after his fiancée had fallen asleep in bed, Adam Edwards read next to her on his phone. He thumbed the screen to scroll through a long article. The words…

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In Old Delhi, not far from Chandni Chowk, on roads plied only by cycle rickshaws and men and women on foot, there is a wonderful little set of alleyways that…

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grief and time Grief takes as long as it wants, in various formations, and doesn’t follow rules the way we’d like to think it does. And for God’s sake, it…

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The day Aaron finished rehab, Cassie picked him up and drove him to New York City. Though they lived in Boston, and the facility was north, in New Hampshire, it…

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From the novel Silverview 

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the professor of archaeology In the small Southern town where Corinne has rented an apartment for the summer, she has found a yoga studio. It’s quainter than her usual one…

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For years, people asked Rochelle: What were you thinking? Everybody wanted to know. Strangers would cross the street to cut her off on the sidewalk. Hey, they would say. Tell…

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After the event, it was observed that there can be no neutral bystanders. If employment of the passive voice has also been observed in the preceding sentence—as in, if some…

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Krems, whose splendor the Arab geographer al-Idrisi celebrated in 1153 as surpassing, in his view, that of Vienna, today resembles Vineta, the city submerged by the waters, among whose streets…

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Justine was twenty-one years old that spring, Jeffers, the age at which a person begins to show her true colors, and in many ways she was revealing herself to be…

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The saleswoman was waiting for them as they entered the store. She had severely dyed hair and a clipboard clutched tightly to her chest. Josh thought it was possibly her…

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Too early for spring, you couldn’t trust such blinding-white sunshine in mid-March. And the smell of damp earth thawing, reviving—too soon. Abigail was feeling light-headed. Unreal. A seismic sensation, as…

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I am a member of the Very Beneficial Changeling Society. Perhaps you have heard of us? We love our name, the Very Beneficial Changeling Society, because it indicates in some…

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Perhaps she should have known that she would find her lost love—her Viking husband, gone these many years—in Sydesgaard, on the island of Funen, in the village of his people.…

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Called out of retirement. Already onto other things. Netflix, Roku haiku, one patient Basho letter at a time. Onto berating the orange sun god, with his changeable guard of hagiographers… 

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The Dogman snuck back from the bar with two Kölsches and stuck one in front of me. An old gesture. Old for us, old for history. “I quit drinking,” I…

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From the novel The Silence 

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The exhibit had been up for three weeks when the trouble started. As soon as Cliff arrived at the gallery that afternoon, Georgina got up from the stool where they…

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Getting past the mastodon took planning. The great plated skull was wedged between the fireplace and the credenza, leaving the two ivory tusks splayed across the carpet where a coffee…

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The first time she flies home for the holidays, Iris makes two friends. She is seated between a married couple, because the woman prefers the window and the man prefers…

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The old window gave a grand view of Yellow Tree, trunk to branch. They called it Yellow Tree even though the ginkgo was yellow for only about a week each…

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