Fiction by Ling Ma, Per Petterson, Tove Ditlevsen, and Lydia Millet, and essays by David Sedaris

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The last thing I remembered was her demonstration of putting on an oxygen mask in case of emergency. Standing in front of the curtain divider separating Economy from First Class, she had mimed disaster protocol. In case of an ocean landing, the seat cushion could be used as a flotation device. I had closed my eyes then. In case of a crash, I thought, as the Ambien took effect, my husband would put the oxygen mask on me. He would inflate my seat cushion for me. We'd reconcile our marriage in the face of catastrophe.
          I disembarked from the plane. Peter was not at the exit either. A welcome sign, printed in English, greeted all arriving travelers: THERE ARE NO STRANGERS IN GARBOZA. 
—From Bliss Montage, a collection of short stories by Ling Ma (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022). This segment, from the short story "Returning" (pp. 87-136), appears on page 88 of the hardcover. 

I cannot remember exactly the first time I took the bus down to Oslo city centre to walk the streets of an evening, go to bars, visit pubs and cafés, but it must have been shortly after Turid marched out, the same month, most likely, and therefore one long year after the ship burned with my loved ones in it, as they put it on the news, his loved ones perished onboard a burning ship, in a cabin, in a corridor, they vanished at sea, they fell out of this life not far from a duty-free shop. 
          What I remember is sitting in my usual seat at the very back of the bus, on the way down from Bjølsen, Sagene, wearing my best clothes, which was my reefer jacket, the same old, but with new brass buttons I had bought from a helpful lady with needle and thread at the Button House behind the Parliament building, and every button shiny bright with an anchor stamped on it. I wore a yellow neckerchief with the knot at the back and outmoded, undramatically flared trousers to accentuate the sailor style. I was freshly showered, my hair freshly washed, I was making up for what was lost, whatever lost there was, I was thirty-eight years old, everything was blown, I had nothing left.
—From Men in My Situation, a novel by Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey (Graywolf Press, 2022). The excerpt above appears on page 19 of the hardcover. This book was originally published as Menn i min situasjon in Norway in 2018 by Forlaget Oktober AS, and it was first published in English by Harvill Secker/Penguin Random House UK in 2021.

In the evening it was a little better. She could smooth it out and look at it, cautiously, hoping that someday she would have a full view of it, as if it were an unfinished, multi-colored Gobelin tapestry whose pattern would perhaps be revealed one day. The voices came back to her; with a little patience, they could be unraveled from each other like the strands of a tangled ball of yarn. She could think about the words in peace, without fearing that new ones would appear before the night was over. During this time the night held the days apart only with difficulty, and if she happened to breathe a hole into the darkness, like on a frost-covered windowpane, the morning might shine into her eyes hours ahead of time.
—From The Faces, a short novel by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally (Picador, 2022). This book was originally published in 1968 by Hasselbalch, Denmark, as Ansigterne. 

I had assumed for some reason that a firing range would be outdoors, but instead it was situated in a strip mall, next to a tractor-supply store. Inside were glass display cases filled with weapons, and a wall of purses a woman could hide a dainty pistol in. This was a niche market I knew nothing about until I returned to Lisa’s house later that day and went online. There I found websites selling gun-concealing vests, T-shirts, jackets—you name it. One company makes boxer briefs with a holster in the back, which they call "Compression Concealment Shorts" but which I would call gunderpants.
—From Happy-Go-Lucky, a collection of essays by David Sedaris (Little, Brown & Company, 2022). This segment is from the essay "Active Shooter" (pp. 3-15), which first appeared in The New Yorker (July 2, 2018).

When he decided to leave New York, he chose Arizona because of some drone footage he'd seen. It wove through the canyons of red-rock mountain foothills, over sage-green scrub and towering cacti with their arms outstretched. Then up into the higher elevations, where there were forests of ponderosa pine.
—From Dinosaurs, a novel by Lydia Millet (W.W. Norton & Company, 2022). 

Collections of literature on migraine, poetry by Arab women, essays by Ashley Marie Farmer, and short stories by Sindya Bhanoo

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We're driving through South Dakota when I see the tall grass on the side of the road turn liquid. Then the plains come alive: They breathe and relax, breathe and relax. We could be in a boat on a golden ocean for all the dipping and swaying. After a while, the horizon flickers and sends up a filmy light. The air itself is viscous, moved by wind, distorting the landscape. 
—From "The Lightning in My Eyes," an essay by Jean Hanson, from So Much More Than a Headache: Understanding Migraine through Literature (The Kent State University Press, 2020), a collection edited by Kathleen J. O'Shea. This essay appeared on pages 30-35.

After a supper of roasted lamb and eggplant, 
fish baked with tahini and lemon,
Mother offers everyone demitasse.
She places the small gold cups 
just so on the Quaker lace.
—From "The World Is a Wedding," a poem by Adele Ne Jame, from The Poetry of Arab Women (Interlink Books, 2001), a collection edited by Nathalie Handal. This poem appeared on pages 241-242. "The World Is a Wedding" was originally published in a collection of Adele Ne Jame's poetry, Field Work (Petronium Press, 1996).

On January 19, 2014, my grandfather Bill walked into my grandmother Frances's hospital room with a loaded gun he'd purchased that morning. He set their Neptune Society cards side by side on a nearby table and kissed his sleeping wife of sixty-three years. Then he shot her once in a the chest. He tried to shoot himself, too, but a spring popped from the pawn shop gun and the weapon broke apart in his hands. . . . 
          See, two weeks before my grandfather bought the gun, my grandmother tripped as she walked across their living room. It was a swift accident on an ordinary day . . .
—From Dear Damage, a collection of essays by Ashley Marie Farmer (Sarabande Books, 2022). These two segments appear on pages 3 and 6 and are from the first essay, "Mercy." 

I held his hand until the ambulance arrived. It was the first time that I had held a man's hand since my husband died. The rectangular diamond on Mr. Swaminathan's gold ring was hard and cold in contrast to his warm skin. Before they loaded his body onto the gurney, he opened his eyes, looked at me, and said, "Renuka." Then he squeezed my hand. Whether he was asking me to summon his wife, or whether he thought I was his wife, I cannot say. He died before he reached the hospital. He was seventy-five years old, the same age my husband would be if he were alive today.
—From Seeking Fortune Elsewhere, a collection of short stories by Sindya Bhanoo (Catapult, 2022). This section is from the first story, "Malliga Homes," which was first published in Granta. It was the winner of the Disquiet Prize for Fiction 2020 and was selected by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for an O. Henry Prize.

I was at the college for an author talk on a novel based on local history. A few dozen people attended and most of us headed afterward to a refreshment table loaded with desserts prepared by students in the culinary school. I put slices of pound cake and chocolate cake on a paper plate and I stood at a small table that supported my cup of water as I ate. If the cake hadn't looked so delicious I'd have bolted after the writer's last word because I'd seen Mr. and Mrs. Y in the audience and feared she'd buttonhole me. Mrs. Y and I were former colleagues and we hadn't seen each other in almost a year.
—From "Buttonhole," a story by Glen Pourciau, New World Writing Quarterly (October 5, 2022).  

The Fall 2022 issue of the Apple Valley Review

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The Fall 2022 issue of the Apple Valley Review features short fiction by Emmanuel Nwafor, K. A. Polzin, Conor Barnes, and Magda Bartkowska; creative nonfiction by Yuko Iida Frost; poetry by Eric Braude, Tina Blade, Miriam Levine, Paul Dickey, Devon Brock, Hedy Habra, and Matthew Johnson; and cover artwork by Japanese woodblock printmaker Hasui Kawase. 

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. 

Short stories by Michael Chabon, fiction by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, and poetry by Iman Mersal, James Harmon Clinton, and Valzhyna Mort

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Very early one Tuesday morning in March—I remember it was still dark, and there were three nurses waiting for a bus on the corner—I came in from the bone-snapping cold to find several lights on and the apartment warm. It surprised me to find Harry home, and awake, since lately he had taken to spending almost every night at Kim's, over on Beacon, and I was even more surprised that he had turned on the steam heat. Out of Harry's chronic tightfistedness—we were responsible for half of the heating bill—and some perverse impulse of mine to test our seven years' friendship, we had at some point during December made a tacit pact never to open the radiators, and ever since we had been going around the house in our ski caps and down coats, exhaling puffs of vapor in the frigid bathroom and wearing gloves to cook dinner; the clouds of steam produced by the act of dumping a boiling pot of spaghetti into a colander in the sink were thick and billowing. It was a kind of dare, to see who would succumb first to the cold, but it did not please me to discover that I had won. Something was the matter with Harry. 
—From "Millionaires," a short story by Michael Chabon, from his collection A Model World and Other Stories (Harper Perennial, 2005), pp. 105-127. The segment here is from pages 106-107. The collection was first published in hardcover by Avon in 1992. This particular story first appeared in The New Yorker, Issue 197 (January 29, 1990). If you have a subscription to The New Yorker, you can sign in and read "Millionaires" in a flipbook from the archive. The story starts on page 32 of the issue from January 29, 1990.

Night. The kid's asleep. I keep up my defences, though every now and then my daughter delivers a new blow: just before New Year—I'll never forget this—Tima and I were planning to spend it at home, as usual no one had invited us anywhere, we went to the Christmas tree market and gathered up a bouquet of the bushiest fan-shaped branches, just like a tree! Then we made some little flags and animals out of coloured paper from old magazines, and at that point Alyona shows up, supposedly to wish us a happy New Year; she'd bought Tima a blue plastic cat of surpassing ugliness but Tima made a great fuss of it, tucked it up in bed, and I didn't tell the poor child that his own mother, completely brazen, had stolen from her own family home two boxes of Christmas tree decorations, leaving us only three. I wept. 
—From The Time: Night, a short novel by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated from the Russian by Sally Laird (Northwestern University Press, 2000). Originally published in Russian in Novy Mir, No. 2, 1992. First published in English by Pantheon Books, New York, and and Virago Press Limited, London. This segment is from page 30.
   

Once, on the train, an Afghan woman who had never seen Afghanistan said to me, "Triumph is possible." Is that a prophecy? I wanted to ask. But my Persian was straight from a beginner’s textbook and she looked, while listening to me, as though she were picking through a wardrobe whose owner had died in a fire. 
—From "A Celebration," a prose poem by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell, The Paris Review, Issue 197 (Summer 2011).  

I have abstained from grief these past days.
Now the rain approaches like a slow train,
summer in its carriage. . . . 
—From "Not in Matter," a poem by James Harmon Clinton, The Decadent Review. 

As I eat my lunch, you talk, with gusto, about hunger. When I complain about my unfashionable clothes, you laugh remembering your wedding—you borrowed a white robe from a nurse to wear as a wedding dress. When I beg for privacy, you ask: "Did I tell you about the day the Bolsheviks came to take the roof off our farmhouse?" Or worse: "Did I tell you about the house where my mother died right after sending my brothers and me to an orphanage?" "Did I tell you about how Uncle Kazik died?" "Did I tell you how the Soviets took my father twice, and since he did return after the first time, I didn't cry a bit when they took him the second time?"
—From "Baba Bronya," a prose poem by Valzhyna Mort, from her collection Music for the Dead and Resurrected (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). This poem appears on pages 52-57 of the hardcover.   

Poetry by Danusha Laméris and Marie Howe, a novel by Elisa Shua Dusapin, nonfiction by Ann Patchett, and short stories by Eudora Welty

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At night, my husband takes it off
puts it on the dresser beside his wallet and keys
laying down, for a moment, the accoutrements of manhood. 
—From "The Watch," a poem by Danusha Laméris, The American Poetry Review, Volume 45, Number 06 (November/December 2016) and Best American Poetry 2017. 

That he wrote it with his hand and folded the paper
and slipped it into the envelope and sealed it with his tongue
and pressed it closed so I might open it with my fingers. 
—From "The Letter, 1968," a poem by Marie Howe, The New Yorker (March 21, 2022), p. 59. 

He arrived bundled up in a winter coat.
          He put his suitcase down at my feet and pulled off his hat. Western face. Dark eyes. Hair combed to one side. He looked straight through me, without seeing me. Somewhat impatiently, he asked me in English if he could stay for a few days while he looked around for something else. I gave him a registration form to fill in. He handed me his passport so I could do it for him. Yan Kerrand, 1968, from Granville. A Frenchman. He seemed younger than in the photo, his cheeks less hollow. I held out my pencil for him to sign and he took a pen from his coat.
—From Winter in Sokcho, a novel by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins (Open Letter, 2021). It was first published in French in 2016 as Hiver à Sokcho and is now available in several other languages. The first edition in English in the United Kingdom was published by Daunt Books (2020). 

I was no stranger to the single engine. My stepfather Mike had rented planes when I was growing up, and, with my mother, flew to some of the medical meetings where he gave lectures. Sometimes I was in the back with the luggage. My mother had taken enough flying lessons to know how to land should she be called upon to do so. She went so far as to solo, but then quit before she got her license. When we moved to the country outside of Nashville, Mike bought a tiny bright-red helicopter which he flew for years. He kept it in a hangar in the front of the farm where we lived.
—From "Flight Plan," an essay by Ann Patchett, in her collection These Precious Days (HarperCollins, 2021). This essay begins on page 91 of the hardcover. 

When he got to his own house, William Wallace saw to his surprise that it had not rained at all. But there, curved over the roof, was something he had never seen before as long as he could remember, a rainbow at night. In the light of the moon, which had risen again, it looked small and of gauzy material, like a lady’s summer dress, a faint veil through which the stars showed.
—From "The Wide Net," a short story by Eudora Welty, in Selected Stories of Eudora Welty , containing all of A Curtain of Green and Other Stories and The Wide Net and Other Stories (The Modern Library/Random House, 1943). This segment is from page 70 of the second half of the book. I was inspired to pick it back up again after reading one of Ann Patchett's essays in These Precious Days, "Eudora Welty, an Introduction," pp. 85-90. 

Fiction by Ayşegül Savaş and Camille Bordas, and poetry by Chloe Honum

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I'd been at the apartment for two months when Agnes wrote that she was coming. 
          I heard her from the bedroom late one evening. The door in the hallway opened and closed. She didn't call out to me before going up to the studio. 
          The following day as I was leaving for the library, I ran into her on the building stairs. She was tall and pleasingly thin. Her dark hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was dressed in a crisp white shirt, opening up into an elegant ruffle on one side of her waist, at once striking and casual. Her shoes resembled royal slippers and were the same soft shade of green as her trousers. She may have been on her way to the opera or to a bookshop and would have been comfortable in either place. She wore no ornaments, except for a rectangular gray stone ring on one finger, which I noticed when she extended her hand. 
          "You must be our tenant," she said. "Finally, we meet." 
          She enunciated each word, as if she were reading aloud from a book. 
—From White on White, a novel by Ayşegül Savaş (Riverhead Books, 2021). This section is from page 14 of the hardcover.

This is not a rewrite of that story in which plants and animals and people keep winding up dead over the course of a school year, but it starts the same, and it feels odd not to acknowledge, so I will. I just did. Things kept dying. My father first, in June, then the puppy my ex-wife had adopted to help the children get over their grandpa, and then the school janitor, Lane. Right after Halloween, Lane had died during lunchtime in the cafeteria, in front of the kids. Heart attack. A few weeks later, my son, Ernest, came home from school and told me that he hoped there was no afterlife.
          "I hope there’s no afterlife," he said. We were in the living room, looking through the window, waiting to see if the rain would turn to snow. "I hope he's not watching over me."
          I asked who he meant. I thought maybe he was talking about my father, but perhaps it was Lane on his mind. I didn't think it could be the dog.
—From "One Sun Only," a short story by Camille Bordas, The New Yorker (March 7, 2022), pp. 58-64.

Nightly, the smoke from the neighbor's incinerator pawed the air
          in our garden. Black flecks of newspaper settled
across the violets. . . .
—From "Nightfall in Spring," a poem by Chloe Honum, from her collection The Lantern Room (Tupelo Press, 2022), p. 9. My other favorite from this collection of poems was the one that inspired me to buy the book in the first place: "At a Days Inn in Barstow, California" (Poem-a-Day, May 15, 2019, Academy of American Poets). It appeared on page 46 of The Lantern Room. Many of the poems from this book previously appeared in her chapbook Then Winter (Bull City Press, 2017). Honum is also the author of The Tulip-Flame (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014). That book's cover, which I find really astonishing, features a photograph of this piece of artwork: Bust (Impression), life size: 17" x 21.5" x 13", 2005, cast glass, by Karen LaMonte. 

The Spring 2022 issue of the Apple Valley Review

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The Spring 2022 issue of the Apple Valley Review features creative nonfiction by Charlotte San Juan and Amy Kroin; short fiction by Péter Moesko (translated from the Hungarian by Walter Burgess and Marietta Morry) and Lucy Zhang; poetry by Jane C. Miller, Wojciech Kass (translated from the Polish by Daniel Bourne), Lulu Liu, Paola d’Agnese (translated from the Italian by Toti O’Brien), Amanda Rachel Robins, and Nathaniel Cairney; and a cover photograph by Kyaw Tun.

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 by Ayşegül Savaş and several poems

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She didn't think they'd be staying home very much—there were so many places she wanted to take Leo—but she had in mind a scene of the two of them eating in bed. Did people really do that? It seemed as though there would be too much mess, nowhere to put your plate. Still, she liked the idea: the sleepy indulgence, the sheets streaked with light—the hour, in her imagination, was late afternoon, which may have been the reason for the beer, though this particular timing would require some planning, with everything else she wanted to do with him.
—From "Long Distance," a short story by Ayşegül Savaş, The New Yorker (January 31, 2022), pp. 50-55.

It's dusk on a Tuesday in June. A hot wind
       bears down and east. In my room, a stranger's
hairclip lies like a gilded insect beside the sink.
—From "At a Days Inn in Barstow, California," a poem by Chloe Honum (Poem-a-Day, May 15, 2019, Academy of American Poets). 

When the big clock at the train station stopped,
the leaves kept falling,
the trains kept running,
my mother's hair kept growing longer and blacker,
and my father's body kept filling up with time.
—From "Big Clock," a poem by Li-Young Lee (Poem-a-Day, December 8, 2021, Academy of American Poets). 

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store   
and the gas station and the green market and   
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,   
as she runs along two or three steps behind me . . .   
—From "Hurry," a poem by Marie Howe, from her collection Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W. W. Norton, 2008). Her poem "My Dead Friends" was just published two days ago (Poem-a-Day, February 22, 2022, Academy of American Poets).

Behind the brick house next to us: 
an indoor pool, enormous, used only 
by invisible swimmers.
All winter the windows steam and clear. 
—From "Neighbors," a poem by Laura Cherry, from her collection Haunts (Cooper Dillon Books, 2010), p. 35. It previously appeared in her chapbook, What We Planted, which was the winner of the 2002 Philbrick Poetry Award by the Providence Athenaeum. My other favorite from Haunts was "The Grownups Take Charge," the third part of a four-part poem, p. 70. 

Poetry by Louise Glück, an essay by Akhil Sharma, and fiction by Choi Eunyoung and Domenico Starnone

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My story begins very simply: I could speak and I was happy.
Or: I could speak, thus I was happy.
Or: I was happy, thus speaking.
I was like a bright light passing through a dark room. 
—From Faithful and Virtuous Night, an award-winning collection of poems by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). This section is from the title poem, pp. 8-17. My other favorite poems in this collection are "A Sharply Worded Silence," pp. 19-21; "The Melancholy Assistant," pp. 45-46; and "A Foreshortened Journey," pp. 47-48.

She kept checking her reflection in building windows. This was our first invitation to someone's home since we'd arrived [in Germany] three months before, so I guessed Mom was feeling nervous in a good way.
         "Xin chào." Mom said the memorized Vietnamese greeting when Mrs. Nguyển opened the front door. I chimed in, "Xin chào," and Mrs. Nguyển smiled in delighted surprise. She greeted us like we were old friends she hadn't seen in years. Mr. Hồ was in the kitchen. His ruddy cheeks and boyishly mischievous face instantly won me over. Mr. Hồ was Dad's coworker, and when he discovered I'd become classmates with his son, Thuỷ, he invited our whole family to his house.
        The dinner Mr. Hồ made was simple, cozy fare. I'm not sure if you can call food "cozy," but there's no other word for it. Beef stew with tomatoes cooked over a slow fire, fragrant steamed rice, grilled prawns, sauteed vegetables, savory fried dumplings with half a lime squeezed over them. 
—From Shoko's Smile, a collection of short stories by Choi Eunyoung, translated from the Korean by Sung Ryu (Penguin Books, 2021). This section is from "Xin Chào, Xin Chào," pp. 59-85. My other favorite story in this collection is the last one, "The Secret," pp. 232-256. 

Christine grew up very poor in Dublin. As a child, she experienced periodic bouts of homelessness. When her family was able to get public housing, it was in a neighborhood where heroin was endemic. The family eventually settled in an area where children were regularly attacked by a local pit bull and people would come running with flaming torches, because fire was one of the few things that would make the dog unclench its jaws. I grew up with a severely brain-damaged brother, whom my parents took care of at home. My brother could not walk or talk or roll over in his sleep. Some nights, we didn't have health aides and my parents stayed up to turn him from side to side so he wouldn't get bedsores. My wife and I are careful people. We feel lucky to have the lives we have, and we don't want to mess them up. Our imaginary child was not careful at all.
        Normally, it is the parents who imagine a future for the child and, through the imagining, hold open a space for the child to step into. In our case, it was the reverse.
—From "A Passage to Parenthood," published in print as "Imagining Ziggy," a personal essay by Akhil Sharma, The New Yorker (January 31, 2022), pp. 24-28.

On that occasion, maybe I interrupted her one too many times, since I liked the girl from Arles and wanted her to like me. Then Teresa turned to me, furious, seizing the bread knife and shouting: try to cut off what I'm saying one more time and I'll cut out your tongue and then some. We faced off in public as if we were alone, and today I believe we really were, such was the extent that we were absorbed with each other, for good and for ill. Our acquaintances were there, sure, and the girl from Arles, but they were inessential figures, all that mattered was our ongoing attraction and repulsion. It was as if our boundless admiration for each other only served to ascertain that we loathed each other, and vice versa.
—From Trust, a novel by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa Editions, 2021). This segment appears on page 15.