…to James Pelish, sends it off before hurrying to his graduate seminar, grabbing some notes for an abandoned paper on Every Man In His Humour on his way. The class goes about as expected. Most of the students haven’t done the reading, stare at their hands through Paul’s discussion questions. When he tries to riff off his old notes, Lucy… [Read More]

…kind of war with its own casualties raged at home that summer: riots spreading from city to city, domestic combat zones that led to the deployment of 1,700 army troops in Newark and Detroit. Before long, the papers were reporting those dead and wounded, too. For the two months I worked at the VA, I didn’t have a single exchange… [Read More]

…Expatriate Writer (Portland, Oregon) Kelly Puig Carroll, Letter to Arthur Richard Wiley, Reading Faust in Shimoda Kelly Puig Carroll, The Transmutation of Fernando Pessoa’s Remains Vol. XXVII No. 3 (Winter 2014) Jennifer Clements, At Your Age Laura Legge, Clutch Micah Dean Hicks, Flight of the Crow Boys John Thornton Williams, Graveyard Andrew Gretes, Hannibal Jennifer Pashley, Strange Animals Molia Dumbleton,… [Read More]

…another way I might preserve for our children something of Emily’s voice in the emails sent to classmates from high school, college, and graduate school. Actually, it has been good for me as well. Reading through these saved messages has made me realize just how much of her voice I miss. As her health worsened over those four and a… [Read More]

…I think I knew pretty quickly that she was going to be Japanese-Mexican. It was an intuitive choice that I came to better understand later on. AN: It’s obvious from reading her that she was a lot of fun to write. CG: Yes—I think I have this thing for Amazonian women; there are a lot of them rampaging through the… [Read More]

…you were familiar with James Michener, whose Alaska she was reading for her book club. You listened to their pleasantries, trying to detect a note of disappointment, a wistful wish that their son had found himself a white girlfriend instead. You heard nothing but geniality. They seemed to embody a term you had come across when reading Edith Wharton: “well-bred.”… [Read More]

…kitchen. We’d been on a flight that passed over Ukraine just hours after the Malaysian plane crashed: returning from a trip to Cyprus and Turkey, we were about to leave Istanbul when we heard the news. Once we returned home, I couldn’t stop reading about that Malaysian jet being shot down, thinking about the people who became bodies that fell… [Read More]

If this transmission should find you now continents removed from my last confirmed location, now in your era of no–go glaciers where your people tinder the jungle and marsh–make their tundra and you’re reading this there on your screen porch in the Tropic of Glasgow where you awoke this morning to what seemed at first a loon beneath your pillow… [Read More]

…went back to his apartment. At four-thirty he woke up to the sound of white noise coming from the TV. He turned off the set and stumbled into the bedroom, took off his clothes, and climbed into bed. He felt a small, slightly oily object in the bed. Switching on his reading light, he threw back the covers and found… [Read More]

…conversations with the sole intention of ram-rodding that particular phrase down the unfortunate throat of anyone whom I happened to be engaged with, in what was, up to that point, casual conversation: “So, are you reading anything these days? No? Me? Well, me—lately I’ve been reading this incredible writer named Philip Roth and… I don’t know… I just feel like… [Read More]