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…
By Alejandro Zambra, from Multiple Choice, which was published this month by Penguin Books. Zambra’s most recent collection of stories is My Documents. Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.
On my way home today I saw someone in the field, someone I once knew. I was coming down the road from a hill and saw him from a distance.…
By Amie Barrodale, from “Night Report.” The story appears in You Are Having a Good Time, a collection of Barrodale’s fiction that will be published next month by Farrar, Straus…
The finalists were him and some other people, but really there was just him. Him filming his boy, who was riding a bike for the first time. A red-and-blue Spider-Man…
By Thomas Bernhard, from the short story “Montaigne,” which appears in Goethe Dies, a collection that was published last month by Seagull Books. Bernhard was the author of numerous novels…
The old woman’s husband, even older than she, has lived long enough. She is careful not to say this to her daughters, to her brother, to the doctors. He’s had…
I sat in a taxi with Emma and her son, Stak, all three bodies muscled into the rear seat, and the boy checked the driver’s I.D. and immediately began to…