We Live in Water by Jess Walter

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Jess Walter's 2013 short story collection, We Live in Water, was published by Harper Perennial.  I'm going to single out two stories from this collection:

I suppose I've hated Portland since I took a pop there.  It was a shame, too, because it was the perfect Portland scam.  A guy in my building was a volunteer recruiter for Greenpeace, and one day when he left his car unlocked I stole his pamphlets and sign-up logs.  I couldn't use that shit in Seattle so I drove to Union Station in Portland, picked out two lost kids who looked like they could be college students, and put them out downtown.   
--From "Helpless Little Things," pp. 69-81 (first published in Playboy, Vol. 56, No. 2, February 2009).

Wade's lawyers said they could get him transferred back to Seattle for community service, but he didn't want some old client seeing him cleaning pigeon shit in Pioneer Square.  His kids wanted nothing to do with him.  And until the divorce was finalized, he didn't even know which house to go to.
        No, he said, he'd just do his community service in Spokane.  
--From "The Wolf and the Wild," pp. 133-146 (first published in McSweeney's, Issue 41).

These two stories stood out to me, but the collection is really strong as a whole.  My other favorites were "Don't Eat Cat" (pp. 85-105), "Wheelbarrow Kings" (pp. 147-161), and the third of a set of three linked stories, "The Brakes" (127-131).  The last piece here, which appeared in The Best of McSweeney's and inspired me to read more of Jess Walter's work, was "Statistical Abstract for My Hometown, Spokane, Washington" (163-177).

Three poems by Lynne Knight, a novel by Samanta Schweblin, and a short story collection by Ha Jin

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We broke things.  Glasses, a lead crystal vase, 
the ceramic chicken painted à la portuguaise.  

It was the longest, hardest winter in a decade.
Snow against the windows, sealing us inside.
--From "Survival," a poem by Lynne Knight, published in Poetry Daily on November 10, 2016, from her collection The Persistence of Longing (Terrapin Books, 2016).  


I loved hearing the guy on the local station
in the small town where I lived for twenty years: 
Here in the foothills of the Adirondacks.
I was trying to become a poet, and I thought
everything I heard could become a poem
if I could figure out how to make use of it, 
the way frontierswomen made use of berries . . . 
--From "The Twenty-Year Workshop," a poem by Lynne Knight, Rattle, Number 50 (Winter 2015).  


I was thinking No.  No, oh no.  Not one more thing.
I was thinking my mother, who sat rigid
in the passenger seat crying, How terrible!
as if we had hit a child not your front bumper, 
would drive me mad, and then there would be 
two of us mad, mother and daughter . . . 
--From "To the Young Man Who Cried Out 'What Were You Thinking?' When I Backed Into His Car," a poem by Lynne Knight, Rattle, Number 32 (Winter 2009).  


It's dark and I can't see.  The sheets are rough, they bunch up under my body.  I can't move, but I'm talking.
          It's the worms.  You have to be patient and wait.  And while we wait, we have to find the exact moment when the worms come into being.
--From Fever Dream, a brief novel by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Riverhead Books, 2017).


The moment Hong Chen entered the narrow lane leading to Lilian's house, a bloody rooster landed before her, jumping about and scattering its feathers.  Four little boys ran over with knives and a hatchet in their hands.  "Kill, kill him!" one boy cried, but none of them dared approach the rooster, whose throat was cut half through.
--From "Taking a Husband," a short story by Ha Jin, from his often brutal collection Under the Red Flag (Zoland Books/Steerforth Press, 1999), pp. 132-153.