Fiction

Five Stories

By Diane Williams,

how high? that high He had his stick that was used mostly to point at your head if your head wasn’t held up proudly. I still like that man—Holger! He…

Wrong Object

By Mona Simpson,

H e is a nondescript man. I’d never used that adjective about a client. Not until this one. My seventeenth. He’d requested an evening time and came Tuesdays at six-thirty.…

Mr. Hutchinson

By Caleb Crain,

Mr. Hutchinson took his pipe out of his mouth. “Got a new dog, I see.” He was wearing his buff-colored work suit, which he wore every day because, he said,…

Synchronicity

By John Keeble,

When I came into the kitchen, Ward was using a knife to help his wife, Irene, peel the skin from two buffalo tongues. The skin was discarded in a small…

Four in Prose

By Diane Williams,

I. THE PERVERTED MESSAGE The sky was roseate at the end of the day, in the east rather than in the west — all wrong — when I encountered a mother and…

East Texas Lumber

By Ben Stroud,

Back from lunch, I stood in the early June sun pulling two-by-sixes for somebody else’s load when Mike, the yard manager, came out of the office and yelled, “All right,…

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,…

The Bloodline of the Alkanas

By Cynthia Ozick,

Cyrus Alkana was my father, and if you can recognize this name, you belong to an inconspicuous substratum of humanity — a coterie, if such things can still be said…

The ruin of Amalfitano

By Roberto Bolaño, Translated by Natasha Wimmer

Jonas Chan

By Hanna Pylväinen,

The College Borough

By Joshua Cohen,

Fun won

By Karl Taro Greenfeld,

Our raccoon year

By Paul Theroux,

Train

By Alice Munro,

This is a slow train anyway, and it has slowed some more for the curve. Jackson is the only passenger left, and the next stop is about twenty miles ahead.…