Page 12 | Harper's Magazine

Fiction

Can’t and Won’t

by Lydia Davis,

“How I Read as Quickly as Possible Through My Back Issues of the TLS,” by Lydia Davis, from a collection of stories to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux…

At Night We Walk in Circles

by Spencer McAvoy,

Daniel Alarcón on the actor as character, foreshadowing as bravado, and the visceral nature of curiosity

I Can Say Many Nice Things

by Ben Marcus,

Fleming awoke in the dark and his room felt loose, sloshing so badly he gripped the bed. From his window there was nothing but a hallway, and if he craned…

Interview 8 (Mother)

by Jesse Ball,

By Jesse Ball, from his novel Silence Once Begun, out next month from Pantheon. Ball is the author of several books of fiction and poetry, including, most recently, The Curfew.

Flight

by Dorthe Nors,Translated by Martin Aitken,

By Dorthe Nors, from Karate Chop, a short-story collection to be published in February by Graywolf in collaboration with A Public Space. Nors is the author of several works of…

A Beautiful Truth

by Stephanie McFeeters,

Colin McAdam on ape life, loneliness, and the purpose of language

Alice Munro’s “Train” (2012)

by Harper’s Magazine,

Our warmest congratulations to Alice Munro, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Pure Gold Baby

by Emily Stokes,

Dame Margaret Drabble on the essayistic voice in fiction and North London anthropology

The Gifts of Anna Speight

by Margaret Drabble,

By Margaret Drabble, from The Pure Gold Baby, published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Drabble is the author of many novels and the editor of The Oxford Companion to…

Sic Transit

by T. C. Boyle,

There was a foul odor coming from the house—?the odor, as it turned out, of rotting flesh—?but nobody did anything about it, at least not at first. I was away…

“Knight, Poet, Anarchist”

by Eliot Weinberger,

A new introduction to The Green Child, by Herbert Read