Photo: Michael PereckasOf Darkness is a book about love and death. These seem to me to be the only things worth writing about. When you write about love and death, the beauty in this world’s fabri…
Fiction
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How to Deliver a GeniusAdvice from a St. Petersburg–based website (*)Conceive in April, May, or June. A child conceived in the fall has no chance to amount to anythin…
Mexico City’s TAPO station from above. Photo: Anthony QuigleyShe picks up her suitcase. Gets in line. Shows her ticket without letting her fist tremble. Checks her luggage. They’re not go…
Photo: Gerry Paille/FlickrIn this story from a snowy Greenland, a woman reluctantly joins her husband in the woods for a grouse hunt. Ready . . . aim . . . She’s still in bed. S…
Tamas Galambos, Summer, 1981, oil on canvas. A detail from Galambos’s painting also appears on the cover of García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude reprinted by Pengu…
Photo: Funkyfood London - Paul Williams / AlamyAlong the shore of the Danube, a cat reflects on world history and human nature. From Oppenheimer to Donne to Stalin to Ana Pauker the musin…
Photo by Jo Christian OterhalsIf, the woman thinks, she were an airplane that crashed and someone located the little black box, that would be the sentence they found, to hear water, but n…
Gustav Klimt, Allée in the Gardens of Schloss Kammer, 1912, oil on canvas. Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, Austria / Artothek / Bridgeman imagesRide the tram thro…
Photo: flickr.com/people/duluoz_catsWith Neil Young playing in the background, a New Zealand woman living in Australia recrosses the ocean over a game of Checkers. Luke shakes t…
A long, long, time ago, in the time of the gods, two of them were in love with the same goddess. Que hermosa, with her shining white and blue-blue rainbow hair surrounded by stars circling her li…
Photo by Juan Di Nella/UnsplashI’m not the first to ask, but for a long time I’ve been wondering about one of the first dilemmas we’ve faced as a band: the question of language. To put it in terms of…
Photo by Ariel DovasStasis and disruption go head to head in this story from Macedonia.It’s not clear whether my husband is going to be ambassador for much longer, as he might be rec…
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. – Robert FrostEven from a distance we could tell something was wrong with the wall. When we went out to the pasture the ground seeme…
Photo by Soffie HicksIn this story by Brazil’s nominee for the Nobel Prize, a young girl will let nothing stop her from attending Carnival, not even her dying father.The blue-and-whi…
A broken foot is poor luck and a nuisance. It cancels everything from hikes to trips to Germany. It gives your insurance company an opportunity to feast and acquaints you with an orthopedist, often mo…
Photo by Michael AndrewsOn her eightieth birthday, a woman waits for a telephone call in this story inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sonnet.” How can everything change without our realizin…
Image: © Masha watercolorIn this story, Hungarian author Zsófia Bán writes into a little-known episode from Hungary’s tangled and traumatic pre–and post–World War II history, centered aro…
First published in two parts in 1979 and 1983, Among the Bieresch was praised by critics, winning the Rauris Literature Prize and the Döblin Prize. Forthcoming in English translation fro…
Photo by Brook Ward (Flickr.com/brookward)Some years ago a diabolical fire, triggered by lightning, ravaged Donmark cathedral. It was a terrible tragedy, though fortunately no lives were lost an…
Photo by Eduard Kreis/FlickrDeciding to throw off life’s stagnation, a woman moves from Finland to Italy and takes up tossing coins in fountains. But just how much change can she…
Giulia Riccobono, Thanatos (2008), RomeFarid Tali’s Prosopopoeia is a work of postmodern elegy comprising narrative chapters that alternate with dense, lyric…
In this story written in response to current events in Malaysia, a writer confronts the doppelgänger intended to silence her political speech. The Petronas Towers in Malaysia…
Photo by Cranky Messiah/Flickr …
In late-twentieth-century India, a boy whose mother is a stage actress grows up in a traumatic relationship with a viscerally compelling but dying art form—commercial theatre. The sprawl…
