A poem by Ryan Fox and fiction by Akhil Sharma, Miroslav Penkov, and Anthony Doerr

~
You were all over everything. 
I just wanted to read "The Four Quartets."
But there was your handwriting, . . .  
--From "And Both Hands Wash the Face," a poem by Ryan Fox, The New Yorker (May 8, 2017), p. 38.

"Break her arms, break her legs," Lakshman's grandmother would say about her daughter-in-law, "then see how she crawls to her bottle."  What she said made sense.  Lakshman's father refused to beat his wife, though.  "This is America," he said.  "I will go to jail and you will be sitting in India eating warm pakoras." 
--From "You Are Happy?," a short story by Akhil Sharma, The New Yorker (April 17, 2017), pp. 58-63.

Five summers slipped by.  I went to school in the village and in the afternoons I helped Father with the fields.  Father drove an MTZ-50, a tractor made in Minsk.  He'd put me on his lap and make me hold the steering wheel and the steering wheel would shake and twitch in my hands, as the tractor plowed diagonally, leaving terribly distorted lines behind.
        "My arms hurt," I'd say.  "This wheel is too hard."
        "Nose," Father would say, "quit whining.  You're not holding a wheel.  You're holding Life by the throat.  So get your shit together and learn how to choke the bastard, because the bastard already knows how to choke you." 
--From "East of the West," a short story by Miroslav Penkov, The PEN/O'Henry Prize Stories 2012, pp. 157-181.  ("East of the West" was first published in Orion Magazine in May/June 2011).

Tom is born in 1914 in Detroit, a quarter mile from International Salt.  His father is offstage, unaccounted for.  His mother operates a six-room, underinsulated boardinghouse populated with locked doors, behind which drowse the grim possessions of itinerant salt workers: coats the color of mice, tattered mucking boots, aquatints of undressed women, their breasts faded orange.  Every six months a miner is fired or drafted or dies and is replaced by another, so that very early in his life Tom comes to see how the world continually drains itself of young men, leaving behind only objects--empty tobacco pouches, bladeless jackknives, salt-caked trousers--mute, incapable of memory.  
--From "The Deep," a short story by Anthony Doerr, The PEN/O'Henry Prize Stories 2012, pp. 352-370.  ("The Deep" was first published in Zoetrope, Volume 14, Number 3, in Fall 2010).