Fiction by Paul La Farge, Jean Thompson, and Diane Cook; a poem by Jin Cordaro; and the new book by Allie Brosh

 ~

She also has an extensive library of self-help books, which implies that, for all her intelligence and self-possession, Dara may have some problems.  She is for sure a recovering alcoholic; one of the first things she told April P was that she doesn't allow drinking or drugs in her house.  Also, and she did not warn April P about this, Dara is a toucher.  She keeps finding reasons to squeeze April P's arm, pat her hand, give her a mini shoulder rub.  

--From "Rosendale," a short story by Paul La Farge, The New Yorker (September 29, 2014), pp. 72-77. 

He came back.  I saw him

in the grass, the white of him

glowing in the floodlight, . . .

--From "After We Buried the Dog in the Dark," a poem by Jin Cordaro, The Sun (December 2020).

My grandma usually supervised me while my parents were at work.  She'd drink screwdrivers and do the crossword, I'd run around the house and do whatever.  If she hadn't seen me in a while, she'd check to make sure I still had all my fingers, but escaping wasn't a big concern.  The doors were locked.  Just in case, there were jingle bells on the handles.

        The dog door was the single weak point in the fortress.  

--From Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh (Gallery Books, 2020).  It's essentially a sequel to her earlier book, Hyperbole and a Half.  (I referred to that one as a "tragicomic illustrated memoir," which seems about right for this one as well.)  The section above is from page 20 of the hardcover.

The bride and groom had two wedding receptions: the first was in the basement of the Lutheran church right after the ceremony, with punch and cake and coffee and pastel mints.  This was for those of the bride's relatives who were stern about alcohol.  The basement was low-ceilinged and smelled of metallic furnace heat.  Old ladies wearing corsages sat on folding chairs, while other guests stood and managed their cake plates and plastic forks as best they could.  The pastor smiled with professional benevolence.  The bride and groom posed for pictures, buoyed by adrenaline and relief.  There had been so much promised and prepared, and now everything had finally come to pass.    

--From The Year We Left Home, a novel by Jean Thompson (Simon & Schuster, 2011). 

They let me tend to my husband's burial and settle his affairs, which means that for a few days I get to stay in my house, pretend he is away on business while I stand in the closet and smell his clothes.  I cook dinners for two and throw the rest away, or overeat, depending on my mood.  I make a time capsule of pictures I won't be allowed to keep.  I bury it in the yard for a new family to discover.

        But once that work is done, the Placement Team orders me to pack two bags of essentials, good for any climate.  They take the keys to our house, our car.  A crew will come in, price it all, and a sale will be advertised; all the neighbors will come.  I won't be here for any of this, but I've seen it happen to others.  The money will go into my dowry, and then someday, hopefully, another man will marry me.

--From Man V. Nature, a short story collection by Diane Cook (HarperCollins, 2014).  This section is from the first story, "Moving On," which was originally published in Tin House. 

Fiction by Sigrid Nunez, Valérie Perrin, Danielle McLaughlin, and Ben Lerner, and a poem by Lisa Allen Ortiz

 ~ 

I went to hear a man give a talk.  The event was held on a college campus.  The man was a professor, but he taught at a different school, in another part of the country.  He was a well-known author, who, earlier that year, had won an international prize.  But although the event was free and open to the public, the auditorium was only half full.  I myself would not have been in the audience, I would not even have been in that town, had it not been for a coincidence.  A friend of mine was being treated in a local hospital that specializes in treating her particular type of cancer.  I had come to visit this friend, this very dear old friend whom I had not seen in several years, and whom, given the gravity of her illness, I might not see again.  

        It was the third week of September, 2017.  I had booked a room through Airbnb.  The host was a retired librarian, a widow. . . .

        A cat had been promised, but I saw no sign of one.  Only later, when it was time for me to leave, would I learn that, between my booking and my stay, the host's cat had died.  She delivered this news brusquely, immediately changing the subject so that I couldn't ask her about it--which I was in fact going to do only because something in her manner made me think that she wanted to be asked about it.  And it occurred to me that maybe it wasn't emotion that had made her change the subject like that but rather worry that I might later complain.  Depressing host talked too much about dead cat.  The sort of comment you saw on the site all the time.  

--From What Are You Going Through, a novel by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead Books, 2020).  Nunez's previous book, The Friend, was a New York Times bestseller and the winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction.  

We arrived at the Brancion-en-Chalon cemetery on August 15th, 1997.  France was on holiday.  All the locals had taken off.  The birds that fly from grave to grave weren't flying anymore.  The cats that stretch out between the potted plants had disappeared.  It was even too warm for the ants and lizards; all the marble was burning hot.  The gravediggers had the day off, as did the newly deceased.  I wandered alone around the paths, reading the names of people I would never know.  And yet I immediately felt good there.  Where I belonged.  
--From Fresh Water for Flowers, a novel by Valérie Perrin, translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle (Europa Editions, 2020).  Originally published in French as Changer l'eau des fleurs (Editions Albin Michel: Paris, France, 2018).  This segment is from page 17 in the hardcover version.   

From the ditch behind the house, Kate could see her husband up at the old forestry hut, where mottled scrubland gave way to dense lines of trees.  "Colman!" she called, but he didn’t hear.  She watched him swing the axe in a clean arc and thought that from this distance he could be any age.  Lately, she’d found herself wondering what he'd been like as a very young man, a man of twenty. She hadn't known him then.  He had already turned forty when they met.

        It was early April, the fields and ditches coming green again after winter.  Grass verges crept outward, thickening the arteries of narrow lanes.  "There's nothing wrong," she shouted when she was still some yards off.  He was in his shirtsleeves, his coat discarded on the grass beside him.  "Emer rang from London.  She's coming home."
        He put down the axe.  "Home for a visit, or home for good?"  He had dismantled the front of the hut and one of the side walls.  On the floor inside, if floor was the word, she saw empty beer cans, blankets, a ball of blackened tinfoil.

--From "The Dinosaurs on Other Planets," a short story by Danielle McLaughlin, The New Yorker (September 15, 2014), pp. 80-87.  

The year before, they'd found cavities in the author's wisdom teeth; they needed to come out.  He could elect I.V. sedation ("twilight sedation") or just local anesthetic, as the dentist suggested.  They'd taken a panoramic X-ray of his head, chin on a little stand while a camera whirred and clicked around him, and then scheduled the extractions for the following month, when the dentist was back from vacation.  There was no rush.  It would be a few days of unpleasantness, that's all.  Let the office know twenty-four hours in advance if you want the I.V., said the receptionist, whose fingernails were painted with stars.
        He learned from the Internet that the difference between twilight sedation and local anesthesia was not primarily a difference in the amount of pain but in the memory of it.  The benzodiazepines calm you during the procedure, yes, but their main function is to erase your memory of whatever transpires: the dentist getting leverage, cracking, a sudden jet of blood.  This helped explain why the people he asked were fuzzy regarding the details of their own extractions, often unsure if they'd been sedated or not.
        That October his ruminations about twilight sedation dominated his walks with Liza.  They would meet at Grand Army Plaza in the late afternoon and head into the Long Meadow of Prospect Park, then wander along the smaller trails as the light died in the trees.  Finally, it was the last walk before he had to call if he wanted the I.V.

--From "The Golden Vanity," a short story by Ben Lerner, The New Yorker (June 18, 2012), pp. 66-73.

Do bees breathe?

I don't want to look it up.  

I just want to believe 

that you are a bee

and I am the poppy you rest in. 

--From "Exaltation," a poem by Lisa Allen Ortiz, Broadsided Press (August 1, 2019).  

The Fall 2020 issue of the Apple Valley Review

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The Fall 2020 issue of the Apple Valley Review features short fiction by Kevin Bray, Morgan Cross, Adam Luebke, Tove Ditlevsen (translated from the Danish by Michael Goldman), and Epiphany Ferrell; an essay by Samantha Steiner; prose poetry by Tiffany Hsieh; poetry by Liana Sakelliou (translated from the Greek by Don Schofield), DS Maolalai, Emily Hyland, Antonio Machado (translated from the Spanish by Thomas Feeny), and Joseph Zaccardi; and a cover painting by Russian artist Konstantin Somov.

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal. The current issue, previous issues, subscription information, and complete submission guidelines are available at www.applevalleyreview.com.

Fiction from Donatella Di Pietrantonio, Margriet de Moor, Josip Novakovich, and Laura van den Berg

~

The woman who had conceived me didn't get up from the chair.  The child she held in her arms was sucking his thumb on one side of his mouth--maybe a tooth was coming in.  Both of them looked at me, and he stopped his monotonous crying.  I didn't know I had such a little brother.

        "You're here," she said.  "Put down your things."

        I lowered my eyes to the smell of shoes that wafted from the bag if I moved it even slightly.  From behind the closed door of the room at the back came a tense, sonorous snoring.  The baby started whining again and turned to the breast, dripping saliva on the sweaty, faded cotton flowers.  

        "Why don't you close the door?" the mother curtly asked the girl, who hadn't moved.
--From A Girl Returned, a novel by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2019).  Originally published in Italian as L'Arminuta (Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a.: Torino, Italy, 2017).   

I am grateful to my husband for this soft wooden floor, laid with his own two hands.  I know that he salvaged these planks of oak from a scrapyard.  I even know that the wood originally came from the Heide Hotel, an old hunting lodge.  I walk a floor for which a tidy sum was once paid.  As he worked away in the living room--I can still hear the short, intense blasts of hammering--I was running an angled paintbrush along the frame of the door that leads down to the cellar.  I remember how pleased I was with the color, a grayish green that even now, almost fifteen years later, still seems just right.  I recall the stiffness in my fingers when the paint that had dripped down the side of the brush began to dry.  I didn't have much space to work in.  I see very clearly that the sweep of my clumsy efforts was hemmed in by a pile of secondhand chairs and boxes crammed with wedding gifts.  While the Chinese bowls, the tablecloth embroidered with irises, the cocktail shaker, and goodness knows what else are items I still possess and see almost every day, Ton, my young husband, has vanished without a trace.

--From Sleepless Night, a novel by Margriet de Moor, translated from the Dutch by David Doherty (New Vessel Press, 2019).  First published in Dutch as Slapeloze nacht (De Bezige Bij: Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2016).

Ivan Medvedich was washing his silvery mustache after eating a slice of dark bread with honey when a whistle cut through the air, deepened in frequency, and sank into an explosion that shook the house so that a bar of soap slid from the mirror ledge into the sink.

        "Lord have mercy!" his wife Estera said.  "What was that?"

        "The Chetniks, what else."

        Soon, another whistle and another explosion.

        "Run for cover!" Estera shouted.

        "What cover?  This is the safest place in the house."

        Ivan had built the house alone--actually, with a little help from his oldest, flat-footed son, Daniel, who had groaned more than he worked.  It took Ivan twenty years of careful labor to finish the house, but one thing he had skipped: a cellar, perhaps because snakes had nested and floods crept into the cellar of his childhood home.  God is my fortress and my strength was his motto.  But now, in addition to God, a cellar would help.

--From Honey in the Carcase, a collection of short stories by Josip Novakovich (Dzanc Books, 2019).  This section is the beginning of the title story, "Honey in the Carcase," which was first published in The Threepenny Review (Autumn 1993).  This story was later included in The Pushcart Prize XIX (1994-1995) and reprinted in The Literary Review in 2019 as a TLR Share.   

Eventually I come upon a twenty-four-hour diner called Helen's Kitchen.  The door chimes as I enter.  The diner is empty except for two waitresses, standing behind the counter like strange twins, one on the left-hand side, the other on the right.  They are both wearing forest-green aprons and holding white coffee carafes.  They are wearing the same glasses, with pink cat-eye frames; their hair is pulled back into matching French braids.  For a moment, I think Beth Butler's husband has murdered me after all and Helen's Kitchen is the afterlife.  The woman on the left puts down her carafe.  She walks over and rips the the tape from my mouth.

        "How can we help you?" she says. 

--From I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, a collection of short stories by Laura van den Berg (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020).  This section is from "Your Second Wife" (pages 159-173 in the hardcover).  A slightly different version of this story was published in Lenny Letter (August 28, 2018).    

Fiction by Hye-Young Pyun, Lena Andersson, and Tove Jansson

~
Danger warnings are more common than actual danger.  And yet when danger finally does strike, it does so without warning.  That was why the man thought nothing of the quarantine notices and infectious disease prevention regulations posted all around the airport.  He knew that the more caution signs there were, the less danger he was in.  As if overhearing the man's thoughts, a health inspector in a hazmat suit who was scanning the temperatures of disembarking passengers looked hard at the thermometer and gave him a warning frown.  Was it the man's slight fever?  The stink of alcohol wafting off of him?  He clamped his mouth shut and slipped a hand up to his forehead.  It felt like the lid of a rice cooker set to warm.
--From City of Ash and Red, a novel by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (Arcade Publishing, 2018). Originally published in Korean as Jaewa Ppalgang (Changbi Publishers: South Korea, 2010).  Please note: this book contains some specific violence that may not be for everyone. 

Traffic was at a standstill, the cars blocked by a crowd of pedestrians in the middle of the street.  Their voices were nearly loud enough to drown out the blaring of horns.  What had happened?  She could feel everyone's eyes on her.  Could sense them stopping mid-sentence to stare at her.  Stepping back to open a path before she could get too close.  Turning their heads when her eyes met theirs.  Whispering to the people next to them.

        Of course, if she'd actually found the courage to lift her head and look, she would have seen that the others barely registered her presence, but she couldn't manage it.  Se-oh let her head drop further and further.  Any moment now someone was going to recognize her and grab her by the throat or curse at her and demand to know where she'd been hiding.  She hurried away from them.  

--From The Law of Lines, a novel by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (Arcade Publishing, 2020).  Originally published in Korean as Seonui beopchik (Muhakdongne Publishing Group: South Korea).

Every other weekend, Hugo went away.  He said he was going to Borås, where his frail mother lived, but there was something about these trips to Borås that did not quite add up.  There was an unusual vacuum around them, the way unusual vacuums usually surround lies.  The baffling thing was that there was no reason to doubt that the trips were genuine, in the same way that there was no reason he should name a place where he was not going.  But there was still something not quite right.  

        On one of the evenings when they met over food and wine and then went back to his studio, [Ester] saw a train ticket sticking out of the inside pocket of his jacket, which was hanging on the back of a chair.  When he went to the toilet she got up and walked round the room, looked at the art works on the walls and gave the ticket a slight tweak, so light that it hardly counted as an act.

        The ticket was from the previous weekend.  Stockholm-Malmö return, it said.  Not a hint of Borås.

--From Willful Disregard, a novel by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death (Other Press, 2016).  First published in the United Kingdom by Picador (2015).  Originally published in Swedish as Egenmäktigt förfarande – en roman om kärlek (Natur & Kultur: Stockholm, Sweden, 2013).  This segment is from page 38 in the paperback. 

In the past few months at home in Stockholm, she'd written her first play, which was to be performed the coming autumn at a country theater in Västerås.  The play would send her life in a new direction, but of this she knew nothing yet.  The production was called Threesome and was a melancholy reflection on the agonies of love.  Ester Nilsson had striven for psychological realism, and that's exactly what she thought she'd achieved, but the critics would call it absurdist.

        ...

        Threesome was about a man trapped in an unhappy marriage who meets another woman but can't bring himself to leave his wife.  The play was not prophetic.  Nothing is prophetic.  What may look like a prediction is really just a heightened awareness of what has previously come to pass.  What has happened will happen again sooner or later, somewhere, sometime.  And it's likely that it will happen again to the same person because people have their patterns.  

--From Acts of Infidelity, a novel by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel (Other Press, 2018).  First published in English in the United Kingdom by Macmillan Publishers International Limited (2018).  Originally published in Swedish as Utan personligt ansvar (Natur & Kultur: Stockholm, Sweden, 2014).  These segments are from pages 3-5 in the paperback.  

On a windless day in November, shortly after sunrise, she saw a squirrel on the boat beach.  It sat motionless near the water, hardly visible in the half-light, but she knew it was a living squirrel, and she hadn't seen anything alive for a very long time.  The gulls didn't count, they were always flying away.  They were like the wind across the waves and the grass. 

--From "The Squirrel," a short story Tove Jansson.  This story (pp. 38-55) and "The Summer Child" (pp. 150-165) were included in The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella (New York Review Books, 2014). The stories were first published in Swedish by Schildts Förlags AB (Finland).  English translations first appeared in several books (Sort of Books: London, 2006-2013).

Books by Tove Jansson, Ernest Hemingway, Ayşegül Savaş, Dai Sijie, and Yiyun Li

~

"When are you going to die?" the child asked.
        And Grandmother answered, "Soon.  But that is not the least concern of yours."
        "Why?" her grandchild asked.
        She didn't answer.  She walked out on the rock and on toward the ravine.
        "We're not allowed out there!" Sophia screamed.
        "I know," the old woman answered disdainfully.  "Your father won't let either one of us go out to the ravine, but we're going anyway, because your father is asleep and he won't know."
        They walked across the granite.  The moss was slippery.  The sun had come up a good way now, and everything was steaming.  The whole island was covered with a bright haze.  It was very pretty.
        "Will they dig a hole?" asked the child amiably.
        "Yes," she said.  "A big hole."  And she added, insidiously, "Big enough for all of us."
--From The Summer Book, a novel by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal (New York Review Books, 2008).  First published in Swedish as Sommarboken (Schildts Förlags AB: Finland, 1972).

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.
        Now that the bad weather had come, we could leave Paris for a while for a place where this rain would be snow coming down through the pines and covering the road and the high hillsides and at an altitude where we would hear it creak as we walked home at night.  Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.  That was where we could go.  Traveling third class on the train was not expensive.  The pension cost very little more than we spent in Paris.
--From A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway's memoir of his life as a young writer in Paris between 1921 and 1926.  He finished the book in 1960 in Cuba.  I was reading the Vintage Classics version (Random House: London, 2000).  It was first published posthumously in Great Britain (Jonathan Cape: London, 1964).  As I understand the story, his fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, edited his manuscripts and notes after his death to create that particular version of the book.  There is also a "restored edition," which contains additional stories left out of the original published book (Scribner, 2009).

I met M. some months after I moved to Paris from Istanbul.  I arrived in the city without a job or a place to live.  I was enrolled in a literature program in order to obtain a visa, but I knew even before I came that I would not attend any of the classes.
        I had enrolled in the same program once before, a few years after I graduated from university in England.  I had a different vision of myself then, and I worked steadily to achieve it.  I was living in London with my boyfriend, Luke, and putting together my life piece by piece.  I imagined that Luke and I would move to Paris, become its natives, and lead the kind of creative life attributed to the residents of the city.  We even spoke to each other in French while we cooked dinner, in preparation for our new life.  
--From Walking on the Ceiling, a novel by Ayşegül Savaş (Riverhead Books, 2019). 

In 1971 there was little to distinguish us two--one the son of a pulmonary specialist, the other the son of a notorious class enemy who had enjoyed the privilege of touching Mao's teeth--from the hundred-odd "young intellectuals" who were banished to the mountain known as as the Phoenix of the Sky.  The name was a poetic way of suggesting its terrifying altitude . . .
        The Phoenix of the Sky comprised some twenty villages scattered along the single serpentine footpath or hidden in the depths of gloomy valleys.  Usually each village took in five or six young people from the city.  But our village, perched on the summit and the poorest of them all, could only afford two: Luo and me.
--From Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, a novel by Dai Sijie, translated from the French by Ina Rilke (Anchor Books/Random House, 2001).  Originally published in France as Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise (Gallimard: Paris, 2000).

Love is made not to last, I said.  A contestable statement, though he chose not to argue.  Love was the word we had used at his leave-taking, he knowing it was final, I sensing it was the case.  But between sensing and knowing there were seven hours and four states.  Only today did I register that people often in their condolence letters called the loss unfathomable.  The distance at the moment of loss could be calculated: 189,200 fathoms.  (What does it matter that fathom is no longer used to measure from here to there?  To obsolete is to let age, from which death is exempted.)
        Not clear, though, is how to fathom time: from a moment to . . .  Can forever be the other end point?
        But why does it bother you if you insist time does not apply to us anymore? Nikolai said.
--From Where Reasons End, a novel by Yiyun Li (Random House, 2019).  The book is a series of imagined conversations between a mother and her sixteen-year-old son in a suspended, timeless state following his death by suicide.  Li wrote the book after the death of her own teenage son.  It's an unusual, affecting meditation on life, death, and the limitations of language.

Poetry by Ilya Kaminsky, Katherine Fallon, and Robert Hayden; fiction by Amy Hempel; and an essay by James Marcus

~
Inhabitant of earth for fortysomething years 
I once found myself in a peaceful country. . . .  
--From "In a Time of Peace," a poem by Ilya Kaminsky, The New Yorker (February 18 & 25, 2019), pp. 64-65.  "In a Time of Peace"was included in his 2019 collection, Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press).

Milk bones.  Cat food.  Someone else's grandmother's 
stewed tomatoes.  Chocolate covered this, that.
--From "Choke," a poem by Katherine Fallon, which appears on a downloadable broadside from Broadsided Press with artwork by Millian Giang Pham (June 15, 2020).  The link also includes a note on the timing of the publication and a Q&A with the author and artist.

That reminds me of when I knew a romance was over.  I had not seen this fellow in a while, but he suggested we meet up at the train station and take the Acela somewhere, so I thought we'd have several hours to catch up.  And then at the station, we boarded and he led me to our seats in the Quiet Car.  
--From Sing to It, a collection of short fiction by Amy Hempel (Scribner, 2019).  This segment is from "The Quiet Car" (pp. 77-80 in the trade paperback version of the book, which I would recommend over the hardcover purely for the cover art).

Increasingly unsteady even with the walker, he would fall, sometimes knocking over pieces of furniture, creating great crashing sounds that were hard to attribute to such a small, smiling man.  Every time, he got up off the floor--with assistance--and declared that he was fine.  He didn't break an ankle, a hip, a leg, the injuries that so often lead to a death spiral in the elderly.  "You can knock me down, but you can't kill me," he liked to say, dusting himself off. 
--From "Blood Relations," an essay by James Marcus, The New Yorker (March 11, 2019), pp. 34-39.  The piece appeared online with the title "Family Medicine."

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. . . .  
--From "Those Winter Sundays," a poem by Robert Hayden which has been widely anthologized.  (I first read it in 2007 after it was included in the Favorite Poem Project.)  It has also appeared in an earlier form in A Ballad of Remembrance (1962), as well as in its current form in Angle of Ascent: New and Collected Poems (W. W. Norton, 1975) and Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2013).

Fiction by Per Petterson, Howard Norman, Susan Perabo, and Magda Szabó

~
Day was slowly breaking.  I had been standing there for more than two hours and hadn't had a single bite.  It annoyed me, but frankly, fish wasn't my favourite dish any more.  Not like it was in the past.  The fish I did catch, I always gave away.  
        As a rule I drove home before the first cars came down the hill towards the bridge, but today I had frittered my time away.  I hadn't even started to pack my bag, and the cars that were coming were classy cars, expensive cars.  I turned my back to the road, my frayed navy blue reefer jacket wrapped tightly round me.  I'd had that jacket ever since I was a boy in Mørk, and only one of the old brass buttons was still intact, and I had a woollen cap on as blue as the jacket, pulled down over my ears, so from behind I could have been anyone.
        I tied the bait rig to the railing, turned round and crouched down to take a cigarette from the pack I had in my bag.  I really ought to stop smoking, I had started to cough in the mornings, it was a bad sign, and then a car stopped right in front of me with the window on the driver's side level with my face.  I had the cigarette between my lips, and as I stood up, I lit it with a match behind my cupped hand.  I always used matches, I didn't like that plastic.
        It was a grey Mercedes, brand new, and the paintwork was shiny as skin can be shiny at certain times, in certain situations.  Then the window slid down without a sound.
        'It's Jim, isn't it,' he said.
        I knew him at once.  It was Tommy.  His hair had thinned and was greying.  But the horizontal scar above his left eye was still evident, white, luminous silver.  He was wearing a purple coat buttoned to the throat.  It didn't look cheap.  He was the same, and yet he looked like Jon Voigt in Enemy of the State.  Leather gloves.  Blue eyes.  Slightly out of focus.  
        'I guess it is,' I said.
        'Well, I'll be damned.  How long has it been.  Twenty-five years.  Thirty.'  And I said: 
        'About that.  A bit more.'
        He smiled.  'We each went our separate ways that time, didn't we.'  He said it neither this nor that way.
        'That's true,' I said.  He smiled, he was happy to see me, or so it seemed.  
--From I Refuse, a novel by Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (Graywolf Press, 2015). First published in Norwegian as Jeg nekter (Forlaget Oktober: Oslo, Norway, 2012).  First published in English in London, England (Harvill Secker, Random House, 2014).

My name is Fabian Vas.  I live in Witless Bay, Newfoundland.  You would not have heard of me.  Obscurity is not necessarily failure, though; I am a bird artist, and have more or less made a living at it.  Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how I think of myself.
         I discovered my gift for drawing and painting birds early on.  I should better say that my mother saw that someone had filled in the margins of my third-form primer with the sketches of wings, talons, and heads of local birds.  "I though this primer was brand-new," she said.  "But it's full of these bird drawings.  Well, somebody has talent."  After a night's sleep she realized that the pencil work was mine and was what I had been concentrating on during my school lessons.  Actually she seemed quite pleased, and at breakfast the following morning said, "Awfully nice to learn something so unmistakable about one's offspring."  She tore out a page full of heads of gulls and ospreys, wrote, "October 28, 1900," on it, and nailed it to the kitchen door. 
--From The Bird Artist, a novel by Howard Norman (hardcover was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994; softcover by Picador, 1995).

My mother was thrilled to be dying of brain cancer after a lifetime of smoking. She had dodged the bullet of lung cancer after all, she triumphantly announced to me on the phone that summer afternoon. All those years my brothers and I had hassled her, lectured her, begged her, berated her (“Don’t you want to see your grandchildren graduate from college?”)—and for what? Her lungs were fine!
--From Why They Run the Way They Do, a short story collection by Susan Perabo (Simon & Schuster, 2016).  This excerpt is from "Indulgence," pp. 155-171 in the paperback version of the book.  "Indulgence," a short story by Susan Perabo, was first published in One Story, Issue Number 178 (May 3, 2013).

I seldom dream.  When I do, I wake with a start, bathed in sweat.  Then I lie back, waiting for my frantic heart to slow, and reflect on the overwhelming power of night's spell.  As a child and young woman, I had no dreams, either good or bad, but in old age I am confronted repeatedly with horrors from my past, all the more dismaying because compressed and compacted, and more terrible than anything I have lived through.  In fact nothing has ever happened to me of the kind that now drags me screaming from my sleep.
        My dreams are always the same, down to the finest detail, a vision that returns again and again.  In this never-changing dream I am standing in our entrance hall at the foot of the stairs, facing the steel frame and reinforced shatterproof window of the outer door, and I am struggling to turn the lock.  Outside in the street is an ambulance.  Through the glass I can make out the shimmering silhouettes of the paramedics, distorted to unnatural size, their swollen faces haloed like moons.  The key turns, but my efforts are in vain: I cannot open the door.  But I must let the rescuers in, or they'll be too late to save my patient.
--From The Door, a novel by Magda Szabó, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix (New York Review Books, 2015).  It was originally published in Hungarian as Az ajtó (Magvető, 1987); this English translation was first published in Great Britain (Harvill Secker, 2005).

A hopeful poem for Spring 2020 and the last day of Poetry Month

~
He drives up in a Pac Bell truck,
ready to fix my phone
though 611 said my instrument
was at fault, my twenty dollar phone.
He bellies up to the outside wall,
hugging the paint to avoid
the spines of an ancient cactus
and the kitchen window, swung open
to air out the Saturday morning smell
of fried potato and onions.
Finding no problem in the gray box
that splits the wires coming into the house,
he climbs a ladder he leans
against the brick wall that separates us
from looming apartment buildings
and swings up the spiked pole
into Ponderosa pine branches
where a limb weighs down the black wire
bringing electric pulses to me. . . .

—From “Pacific Bell Comes Calling,” a poem by Trina Gaynon. Read the full poem in the Spring 2020 issue of the Apple Valley Review (Volume 15, Number 1).

Find this and other poems from the Apple Valley Review: https://www.applevalleyreview.com

A few poems for sheltering in place during Poetry Month

~
. . .  And
I am an enemy
of change, as
you know.  All
the things I
embrace as new
are in
fact old things,
re-released: swimming,
the sensation of
being dirty in
body and mind
summer as a
time to do
nothing and make
no money.  Prayer
as a last re-
sort.  Pleasure
as a means,
and then a
means again
with no ends
in sight. . . .

--From "Peanut Butter," a poem by Eileen Myles, from her book Not Me (Semiotext(e), 1991).  This poem was recently featured on the Ploughshares blog in a post called "Three Poems of Ordinary Exuberance for Uncertain Times," an essay by Ariel Katz (March 18, 2020). 


I have this, and this isn’t a mouth
       full of the names of odd flowers

I’ve grown in secret.
       I know none of these by name

but have this garden now,
       and pastel somethings bloom

near the others and others.
       I have this trowel, these overalls,

this ridiculous hat now.
       This isn’t a lung full of air.

--From "I Have This Way of Being," a poem by Jamaal May (2016).

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing.  "Help,"
said the flight agent.  "Talk to her.  What is her problem?  We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this."

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
"Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti?  Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-
se-wee?"  The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly
used, she stopped crying.  She thought the flight had been cancelled
entirely.  She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the
next day.  I said, "No, we’re fine, you'll get there, just later, who is
picking you up?  Let’s call him."

--From "Gate A-4," a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, from her children's collection Honeybee (HarperCollins, 2008), pp. 162-164.


A man leaves the world 

and the streets he lived on 

grow a little shorter. 

One more window dark 

in this city, the figs on his branches 

will soften for birds.

--From "Streets," a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, from her book Words Under the Words (Eighth Mountain Press, 1995).

It is December and we must be brave.

The ambulance’s rose of light
blooming against the window.
Its single siren-cry: Help me.
A silk-red shadow unbolting like water
through the orchard of her thigh.

--From "Manhattan Is a Lenape Word," a poem by Natalie Diaz, from her collection Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020).


First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.

--From "Diving into the Wreck," a poem by Adrienne Rich, from her book Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973).

The Spring 2020 issue of the Apple Valley Review

~

The Spring 2020 issue of the Apple Valley Review features poetry by Francesca Gargallo (translated from the Spanish by Dana Delibovi), Carol V. Davis, Robert L. Penick, Eric Stiefel, Trina Gaynon, Stan Sanvel Rubin, Débora Benacot (translated from the Spanish by Margaret Young), and Gail Peck; short fiction by Timothy Kenny; and a cover photograph from Brooklyn by Solomon Laker.  

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal. The current issue, previous issues, subscription information, and complete submission guidelines are available at www.applevalleyreview.com. 

Nonfiction by John Carreyrou, a graphic novel by Benjamin Reiss, and Jenny Offill's new novel

~
Bradley had worked with a lot of sophisticated medical technologies in the army, so he was curious to see the Theranos system in action.  However, he was surprised to learn that Theranos wasn't planning on putting any of its devices in the Pleasanton clinic.  Instead, it had stationed two phlebotomists there to draw blood, and the samples they collected were couriered across San Francisco Bay to Palo Alto for testing.  He also noticed that the phlebotomists were drawing blood from every employee twice, once with a lancet applied to the index finger and a second time the old-fashioned way with a hypodermic needle inserted in the arm.  Why the need for venipunctures--the medical term for needle draws--if the Theranos finger-stick technology was fully developed and ready to be rolled out to consumers, he wondered.   
--From Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, a nonfiction account of the rise and fall of Theranos, by John Carreyrou (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018).  Carreyrou was a member of The Wall Street Journal's investigative reporting team when he initially broke this story.  The quote above is from page 112 of the hardcover edition of the book.

When I was in Japan, everyone kept asking me why I was there.  When I came back, everyone kept asking me what I did there for so long.  Always answering the same questions gets annoying.  
--From Super Tokyoland, a graphic novel by Benjamin Reiss (Top Shelf, 2017).  The first version of the graphic novel, called Tokyoland, was published in France in 2009.  The revised and extended version, Super Tokyoland, was first published in 2015, and was translated and published in English in 2017.  The book is also available for purchase from Penguin Random House.

My brother told me once that he missed drugs because they made the world stop calling to him.  Fair enough, I said.  We were at the supermarket.  All around us things tried to announce their true nature.  But their radiance was faint and fainter still beneath the terrible music.  
--From Weather, a novel by Jenny Offill (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020).

Short stories by Brian Crawford, Richard Berry, Emma Hunsinger, and Kim Chi-wŏn

~
A month later, someone started making small withdrawals from his account, from ATMs up and down Nevada.  The amounts were not material, and anyway it was his own money.  His wife had insisted they each keep separate financial lives.  "You never know what'll happen," she'd said, "and I always want to be able to make it on my own."

--From "Withdrawals," a story by Brian Crawford, Vestal Review, Issue 56 (January 2020).

A woman walks past my stall every afternoon in this spot at 4:15.

--From "The Crayfish Seller," a story by Richard Berry, 100 Word Story (July 2019).

1. Start with three shapes to form the neck, shoulders, and rump.
--From "How to Draw a Horse," an illustrated story by Emma Hunsinger, The New Yorker (December 30, 2019), pp. 40-49.  (Online it is in the section called Culture Desk.  In print, it was Sketchbook by Emma Hunsinger / May 30, 2019.  This graphic story appeared in the Cartoon Takeover issue.)

The young man usually dropped by the woman's West Side wine and spirit shop around 5 p.m. for a bottle of Almaden Chablis.  He came with the throng of rush-hour customers, and she didn't yet know him as one of the regulars.  She was still learning such basics as the shelf location and prices of the items, and although the man brought the same wine to the counter every time, she invariably had to check the price and look up the tax.  Some customers who stuck to one brand would tell her the price, but not this one.  
--From "Almaden," a short story by Kim Chi-wŏn.  It was published in the anthology The Future of Silence: Fiction by Korean Women, which was translated and edited by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (Zephyr Press, 2016), pp. 25-32.

"Almaden" was my favorite story from this collection, but I particularly liked two other stories from The Future of Silence as well: "Dear Distant Love" by Sŏ Yŏng-ŭn (pp. 33-56) and "Identical Apartments" by Pak Wan-sŏ (pp. 57-78).

Poems by David Huddle and Jessica Greenbaum and novels by Jenny Offill and Wioletta Greg

~
When her Alzheimer's was just beginning, 
my mother had a suitor, a farmer
whose wife had died after a long illness, . . .  
--From "Aloft," a poem by David Huddle, The Southern Review, Volume 44:4 (Autumn 2008), pp. 780-782.  This poem was later reprinted in Blacksnake at the Family Reunion, a book of poems by David Huddle (LSU Press, 2012).

Driving into my old city yesterday
for the first visit in decades
every street sign whispered a story
from my only great war
my move here as a lone
21-year old, when by day three
my map of the city
lay shredded from reuse
and humidity and from
shaking it in hopes it would
rearrange into something familiar—
--From "Four a.m. and 40 Years Later, from an Eighteenth Floor Balcony, Downtown," a poem by Jessica Greenbaum, Plume, Issue 101 (January 2020).

One day God called the bat to him and gave him a basket to carry to the moon.  The basket was filled with darkness, but God didn't tell him what it was. . . .  The bat grew tired and stopped for a rest.  He put down the basket and went off to find something to eat.  While he was gone, other animals came along. . . .  The dogs and wolves tried to pull [the darkness] out and play with it, but it slipped away between their teeth and slithered off.  Just then, the bat returned.  He opened the basket and found it empty.  The other animals disappeared into the night.  The bat flew off to try to recapture the darkness.  He could see it everywhere, but he couldn't fit it back inside his basket, no matter how hard he tried.  And this is why the bat sleeps all day and flies all night.  He's still trying to catch the dark.
        "Which part of the story was the part about Africa?" I wanted to know.  I had asked my mother to tell me about Africa and instead she had told me about the bat.  "It's all about Africa," my mother said, frowning.  "Everything except the part about God."   
--From Last Things, a novel by Jenny Offill (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999; Vintage Books/Random House, 2015).

I am nauseated by the odor of musty rugged jackets, wool, the tonics with which the women spritz their hair.  Sitting on my suitcase I stare out the window, where the sunlight disappears into the poplars like when water closes over a cuttlefish.  
        Suddenly I think I see, standing up near the front of the bus, my old acquaintance Kamil, with whom I fell in love over the summer and then lost contact.  That has to be him, I think, thrilled, squeezing myself and my suitcase towards him.
        "Is it really you?" I ask, excited, grasping his leather jacket.  
        "Course it's me, honeycakes," responds this stranger as he eyes me up and down.
--From Accommodations, a novel by Wioletta Grzegorzewska (writing as Wioletta Greg), translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft (Transit Books, 2019). Originally published as Stancje (W.A.B.: Poland, 2017).  This is a follow-up to Swallowing Mercury, which is a beautiful, poetic little novel, also from Transit Books.