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). 

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

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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).