Fiction by Joseph O'Neill, Ottessa Moshfegh, Lily King, and Martin Suter

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The cat looked nothing like Buster.  It didn't even look like a cat.  The vet offered some clearly dishonest and meaningless statistics about the thing's chance of recovery.  She also referred to the expense of keeping it alive.  Martha held Robert's hand as he listened to all of this.  When she understood that Robert could not speak, she took it upon herself to ask the vet the necessary questions.  When the vet again said, The operation was a complete success, Martha said, you know what?  We'd appreciate it if you stopped saying that. 
        The next morning, nothing had changed.  The plug was pulled on Buster.  There were various options with regard to the remains.  Robert decided on the gratis option, namely the garbage.  Buster was garbage at this point.  Over the next few days, handwritten condolence cards arrived from vets.  Bills, too.
--From Good Trouble, a collection of short stories by Joseph O'Neill (Pantheon Books, 2018).  This segment is from "Goose" (pp. 118-131 in hardcover).  The collection also includes stories which first appeared in The New Yorker (e.g., "The Poltroon Husband" and "The Sinking of the Houston") and Harper's Magazine (e.g., "The Trusted Traveler"). 

Whenever I woke up, night or day, I'd shuffle through the bright marble foyer of my building and go up the block and around the corner where there was a bodega that never closed.  I'd get two large coffees with cream and six sugars each, chug the first one in the elevator on the way back up to my apartment, then sip the second one slowly while I watched movies and ate animal crackers and took trazodone and Ambien and Nembutal until I fell asleep again.  I lost track of time in this way.  Days passed.  Weeks.  A few months went by. 
--From My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a novel by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press, 2018).

The summer of 1986, the summer I was fourteen, my parents went to the Dordogne for eight weeks.  My father had been unwell, and it was thought that France, where he had studied as a young man, would enable his recovery.  Through the university’s employment office, my mother hired two sophomores to house-sit for the time they would be out of the country.  As I came with the house, these two college boys were obliged to take care of me, too.
--From "When in the Dordogne," a short story by Lily King, One Story, Issue 212 (October 26, 2015).

No sooner had the barman served him his martini than a woman entered the bar, put her coat and handbag on the bar stool beside Weynfeldt, sat on the next one over and ordered a gin fizz.  She was wearing a green silk Chinese blouse, white arms extending from its short, close sleeves, a tight black skirt and high heels a similar shade of green to the blouse.  Her long red hair was tied up, secured with an imitation tortoiseshell clasp to free her neck, which the blouse's high collar circled loosely.  
--From The Last Weynfeldt, a novel by Martin Suter, translated from the German by Steph Morris (New Vessel Press, 2016).  Originally published in German as Der letzte Weynfeldt (Diogenes Verlag: Zürich, Switzerland, 2008).

In an odd coincidence, the cover design and one of the major plot lines of the book feature Femme nue devant une salamandre (Nude Facing a Stove), a painting by Félix Vallotton.

I published the Spring 2019 issue of the Apple Valley Review in April 2019, and I picked up and started reading The Last Weynfeldt earlier this month (May 2019).  The cover art for AVR's spring issue, which I selected well before reading the book, was Intimité (Intimacy), a painting by Félix Vallotton.  There are times when everything seems interconnected. . . .

Fiction and poetry by Ottessa Moshfegh, Jennifer Kronovet, Domenico Starnone, and more

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My classroom was on the first floor, next to the nuns' lounge.  I used their bathroom to puke in the mornings.  
--From Homesick for Another World, a collection of short stories by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin, 2017).  These lines are from the story "Bettering Myself," which first appeared in The Paris Review. 
 
My husband had warned me about the cameras before we moved to Guangzhou, saying that there would or wouldn’t be video cameras hidden all over our apartment and that someone in the Chinese government would or wouldn’t be watching us at all times.  He told me that there was no point in having a password on my computer because the cameras would see what was on my computer screen.  That’s how good the cameras that did or did not exist were.
--From "The Cameras," a short story by Jennifer Kronovet, Bennington Review, Issue 6.

Today they are talking on the radio about 

how to remember your infant, . . . 

--From "Lost Body," a poem by Jordan Rice, The New York Times Magazine (February 10, 2017).  "Lost Body" is from Constellarium, Jordan Rice's debut collection of poems (Orison Books, 2016).

In case it's slipped your mind, Dear Sir, let me remind you: I am your wife.  I know that this once pleased you and that now, suddenly, it chafes.  I know you pretend that I don't exist, and that I never existed, because you don't want to look bad in front of the highbrow people you frequent.  I know that leading an orderly life, having to come home in time for dinner, sleeping with me instead of with whomever you want, makes you feel like an idiot.

--From Ties, a novel by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa Editions, 2016).  Originally published in Italian as Lacci (Laces) (Einaudi: Torino, Italy, 2014).

That was the summer it rained and rained.  I remember the sad doggish smell of my sweater and my shoes sloshing crazily.  And in every city, the same scene.  A boy stepping into the street and opening an umbrella for a girl keeping dry in the doorway.  
--From Dept. of Speculation, a novel by Jenny Offill (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).

Hélène could not remember having ever experienced a perfect moment.  When she was little, she often surprised her parents with her behavior--constantly tidying her room, changing her clothes the moment there was the slightest spot on them, braiding her hair over and over until she obtained an impeccable symmetry; she shuddered with horror when they took her to see Swan Lake because she alone noticed that there was a lack of rigor in the alignment of the dancers, that their tutus did not all drop down together, and that every time there was a ballerina--never the same one--who disrupted the harmony of the movement.

--From The Most Beautiful Book in the World, a collection of short stories by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (Europa Editions, 2009).  Originally published in French as Odette Toulemonde et autres histoires (Odette Toulemonde and other stories) (Éditions Albin Michel: Paris, France, 2006).  These lines are from the story "A Fine Rainy Day."