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. . . .