"Year's End"

Winter Fiction Issue
"Year's End"
(not available online)
by Jhumpa Lahiri

Rating: 8.3


Short story about an Indian college student whose mother has died and whose father has remarried a young widow named Chitra who has two small daughters. He takes them to Dunkin' Donuts.

... "New roads to explore." And, without our having to say it, I knew we were both thankful to Chitra for chafing under whatever lingered of my mother's spirit in the place she had last called home and for forcing us to shut its doors. ♦

"The Arbus Factor"

Winter Fiction Issue
"The Arbus Factor"
(not available online)
by Lore Segal

Rating: 7.4


Short story about Jack and Hope, advanced in age, meeting for lunch at the Café Provence, just after New Year's. Jack has an agenda.

Gathering her coat and bag, Hope opened the door to the ladies' room and saw, in the mirror above the basins, that her hair was coming out of its pins. She removed all the pins and stood gazing at the crone with the gray, shoulder-length hair girlishly loosened. Hope saw what Diane Arbus might have seen and was appalled, and being appalled pricked her interest right up. "I've got an agenda: the Arbus factor of old age," Hope looked forward to saying to Jack the next time it would be convenient for Jeremy and Nora to arrange lunch for them at the Café Provence. ♦

"Natalie"

Winter Fiction Issue
"Beginners"
by Anne Enright

Rating: 7.5


Short story about a teen-age girl in Dublin. So Natalie put me straight. “Well,” I said, “I won’t be getting in your way again.”

I mean, I will still hang out with Natalie. And I know I’ll get to like her in some different way—probably her way, whatever that is. And I know the thing I have for my boyfriend isn’t love, it’s just a stupid kind of bliss. I know all these things—they’re not what woke me up. What woke me was a feeling like a horror film, except really boring.
It was the sheets. When I lay down, just for a second, on Mr. and Mrs. Casey’s moss-green sheets. Before the dance, when I was all dolled up in my silk skirt, and I pushed my hands along them and put my cheek against the dark cotton, just for a second. It was the smell of those sheets, cool, unwashed—like something I really wanted, going stale.
That is what woke me up.♦

"Beginners"

Winter Fiction Issue
"Beginners"
by Raymond Carver

Rating: 8.8


Short story about four friends drinking gin and talking about love. (This is a draft of Carver’s story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” without Gordon Lish’s edits.)

The shower stopped running. In a minute, I heard whistling as Herb opened the bathroom door. I kept looking at the women at the table. Terri was still crying and Laura was stroking her hair. I turned back to the window. The blue layer of sky had given way now and was turning dark like the rest. But stars had appeared. I recognized Venus and, farther off and to the side, not as bright but unmistakably there on the horizon, Mars. The wind had picked up. I looked at what it was doing to the empty fields. I thought unreasonably that it was too bad the McGinnises no longer kept horses. I wanted to imagine horses rushing through those fields in the near-dark, or even just standing quietly with their heads in opposite directions near the fence. I stood at the window and waited. I knew I had to keep still a while longer, keep my eyes out there, outside the house, as long as there was something left to see. ♦

"Alma"

Winter Fiction Issue
"Alma"
by Juno Diaz

Rating: 6.5


Short story, written in second person, about a young Dominican couple. You have a girlfriend named Alma, who has a long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans.

Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a baby’s beshatted diaper, as one might pinch a recently be-nutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.
This is how you lose her.♦

"The King of Sentences"

"The King of Sentences"
by Jonathan Lethem

Rating: 8.9


Short story about a young man and young woman, both writers, who seek out a reclusive author they’ve coronated “The King of Sentences.”

The King moved to the door. We stood in our bare feet, wobbling slightly, goose-pimpled, still breathing out clouds of expectation like frost-breath.
“That’s all?” Clea said.
“That’s all, you ask? Yes, that’s all. That’s more than enough.”
“You’re leaving us here.”
“I am.”
He closed the door carefully, not slamming it. Clea and I waited an appropriate interval, then turned and clung to each other in a kind of rapture. Understanding, abruptly and at last, just what it takes to be King. How much, in the end, it actually costs. ♦

"Found Objects"

"Found Objects"
by Jennifer Egan

Rating: 7.7


Short story about a New York woman who compulsively steals from people. In the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel, Sasha noticed a bag on the floor that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear. Inside the rim of the bag was a wallet.

“Please,” she told Coz. “Don’t ask me how I feel.”
“All right,” he said quietly.
They sat in silence, the longest silence that had ever passed between them. Sasha looked at the windowpane, rinsed with rain, smearing lights in the falling dark. She lay with her body tensed, claiming the couch, her spot in this room, her view of the window and the walls, the faint hum that was always there when she listened, and these minutes of Coz’s time: another, then another, then one more. ♦

"The Visitor"

"The Visitor"
by Marisa Silver

Rating: 7.6


Short story about Candy, a recently hired nurse’s aide at a V.A. hospital. Candy had been a nurse’s aide for six months. Mentions that Candy’s mother Sylvie used drugs. Candy was not skinny like her mother; she had her grandmother Marjorie’s build.

"Get out! Get out! Come on, now!" she heard her grandmother say, in the gentle, forgiving tone she'd used when she bathed Sylvie or when Candy touched her material with her dirty hands, as if their transgressions didn't really bother her at all, as if she were grateful for the intrusion. ♦

"Àlvaro Rousselot's Journey"

"Àlvaro Rousselot's Journey"
by Roberto Bolaño

Rating: 8.6


Short story about an Argentine writer named Álvaro Rousselot. Álvaro Rousselot loved literature as much as any Argentine writer of his generation. In 1950, he published his first novel, “Solitude.” A French edition, called “Nights on the Pampas,” was published in 1954. In 1957, a film entitled “Lost Voices,”

For the rest of the day, Rousselot felt that he really was an Argentine writer, something he had begun to doubt over the previous days, or perhaps the previous years, partly because he was unsure of himself, but also because he was unsure about the possibility of an Argentine literature. ♦

"Or Else"

"Or Else"
by Antonya Nelson

Rating: 7.9


Short story about a thirty-nine-year-old man taking his girlfriend to a house in Telluride for the weekend. “My family owns a house in Telluride,” was his favorite, most useful line. Danielle was perhaps different from the other women he’d brought here.

“Danielle asked David now, "Do you wish you were in there instead of out here?"
"No," he said. And then he reviewed his response. It was a lie—or else it wasn't. ♦

"Brooklyn Circle"

Face
"Brooklyn Circle"
by Alice Mattison

Rating: 8.4


Short story about Constance and Jerry, a divorced couple in Brooklyn, and their thirty-year-old daughter Joanna. Fourteen years after their divorce, Constance Tepper agreed to let her former husband, Jerry Elias, spend a few days in her Prospect Heights apartment.

“A glass of water would be good.” Jerry stared at the television screen. The gray-green knitted blob next to the sofa seemed larger than it had that morning. Six Americans had died in a helicopter crash in Iraq. Maybe Con would check the police report on Joanna’s arrest, try to figure out if it was legal after all. She retrieved her drink. Her hands still felt lighter and larger than usual, pleasanter than the gray cold hands she’d carried for years. Again she didn’t touch Jerry. She returned to the kitchen and drank, looking at her hands. ♦

H: "A Report On Our Recent Troubles"

"A Report On Our Recent Troubles"
by Steven Millhauser

Rating: 8.1


Short Story about a community's romantic suicide epidemic.

. . . And perhaps what is happening in our town is simply this, that a familiar flicker, of no harm in itself, has been allowed to develop wthout impediment, that our citizens have become gifted in the dark art of not holding back. For at that moment, before we turn away, we too have seen the distant figure beckon, we too have heard the black wings beating in the brain.
Respectfully submitted to the Committee by the undersigned, this 17th day of September. ♦

"The Dog"

Wild Fires
"The Dog"
by Roddy Doyle

Rating: 6.8


Short story about a middle-aged Irish couple, Joe and Mary, who get a dog. She’d been gone for a couple of hours. He watched her taking off her coat. The ear had been the start of it. Years ago now. Mary had been kissing him.

Now she was taking off her new coat.
He didn’t know her. Didn’t know her hair, didn’t know why she’d have wanted a tan in January—didn’t really know how it was done. Some sort of a lamp, or a bed. He didn’t know.
—Your coat’s nice, he said. ♦

"The Cold Outside"

Happy Halloween!
"The Cold Outside"
by John Burnside

Rating: 8.3


Short story, written in the first person, about Bill Harley, a truck driver in Scotland, who is dying of cancer. The narrator was not surprised by the return of his cancer. He was upset for his daughter Caroline, and bothered about how his wife, Sall would take it.

I nodded, but I didn’t move. The door was still open, just enough that I could smell the cold outside, and I heard the dog barking—farther away now, it seemed, at the darker end of the road that ran past our house and into the hills, past the golden lights of farms and dairies and narrow sheep runs through the gorse, where snow was probably beginning to form—real snow this time, not the cold sleet I’d driven through in the woods where I met the boy. For a split second—no more—I wanted to get back in the rig and drive on, up into the darkness, into the origin of the approaching blizzard, just to be alone out there, the way that boy had been alone in the woods. Then, with Sall watching me curiously, and perhaps fearfully, I let go of that thought and went through to the living room, where the curtains were already drawn and the night was nothing more than a story to be told by a warm fire, with the radio humming quietly in the background, so that the world felt familiar and more or less happy, like the future that seemed possible when you didn’t think about dying, or the pastel-colored maps in a childhood atlas that you couldn’t help but go on trusting, even when you knew that they no longer meant what they said. ♦