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.   

Work by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Dan Chiasson, Ruth Reichl, Roz Chast, and more

Once there was a patient in the hospital who was still feeling rather poorly, especially at night.  Part of the problem was a conversation he kept hearing through the wall, day and night.  
--From Through the Wall, a tiny book containing five stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated from the Russian by Anna Summers and Keith Gessen (Penguin, 2011).  Three of the stories published in this Mini Modern Classic were first published in English in book form in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby (Penguin, 2009).  The remaining two stories were published for the first time in English in this collection.  Through the Wall might be a little difficult to find in the U.S.; I was lucky enough to find a used copy at Powell's City of Books in Portland, Oregon. 

Out late and the night is a ruin, my voice says
the night is a ruin, my voice doesn’t say a thing,
my poem says my voice doesn’t say a thing, . . . 

--From "Tulip Tree," a poem by Dan Chiasson.  Knopf included it in their Poem-a-Day mailing for National Poetry Month on April 12, 2019.  "Tulip Tree" was published in Natural History, a collection of poetry by Dan Chiasson (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

Most mornings I got out of bed and went to the refrigerator to see how my mother was feeling.  You could tell instantly just by opening the door.  One day in 1960 I found a whole suckling pig staring at me.  I jumped back and slammed the door, hard.  

--From Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, a memoir by Ruth Reichl (Broadway Books/Random House, 1998). 

My mother's name was Miriam, but most people called her Mim. . . .  I've got Mim Tales by the dozen, and I've used them for years to entertain my friends.  As a writer I've always known how lucky I was to have so much material, and my first book opened with Mom accidentally poisoning a couple of dozen people at a party.  After the book was published people kept asking, "Did she really do those things?"

--From For You Mom, Finally (previously published in hardcover as Not Becoming My Mother), a memoir by Ruth Reichl (Penguin, 2010).

A Note on the Author [Me, age 9, lying in bed reading The Big Book of Horrible Rare Diseases] 

--From Theories of Everything, an enormous collection of cartoons by Roz Chast from 1978 to 2006 (Bloomsbury, 2006).  

A quick side note: 

I don't typically mention book tours because they have a relatively short life span, but Roz Chast is currently on tour with Patricia Marx for their book Why Don't You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It? A Mother's Suggestions (Celadon Books, 2019).  Attend an event if you have the opportunity; they are good friends and very entertaining.  (I'd also recommend seeing Ruth Reichl if you can; she is on tour to promote Save Me the Plums.)     

Our friend came over the other night.  He and his terrible girlfriend had finally broken up.  This was his third breakup with that particular girlfriend, but he insisted it was going to be the one to stick.  He paced around our kitchen, working his way through the ten thousand petty humiliations and torments of their six-month relationship, while we cooed and fretted and bent our faces into sympathetic shapes in his direction.  When he went to the bathroom to collect himself, we collapsed against each other, rolling our eyes and pretending to strangle ourselves and shoot ourselves in the head.  
--From You Know You Want This: "Cat Person" and Other Stories, a collection of short stories by Kristen Roupenian (Scout Press, 2019).  This selection is from "Bad Boy," which first appeared in Body Parts Magazine.   

Short fiction from a collection of scary fairy tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

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There once lived a woman who hated her neighbor—a single mother with a small child.  As the child grew and learned to crawl, the woman would sometimes leave a pot of boiling water in the corridor, or a container full of bleach, or she'd just spread out a whole box of needles right there in the hall.  The poor mother didn't suspect anything—her little girl hadn't learned to walk yet, and she didn't let her out in the corridor during the winter when the floor was cold.  But the time was fast approaching when her daughter would be able to leave the room on her own.  The mother would say to her neighbor, "Raya, sweetie, you dropped your needles again," at which point Raya would blame her poor memory.  "I'm always forgetting things," she'd say.  
        They'd once been friends. . . .   
(From "Revenge," pp. 7-11.)

There once lived a girl who was killed, then brought back to life.  That is, her parents were told that the girl was dead, but they couldn't have the body (they had all been riding the bus together; the girl was standing up front at the time of the explosion, and her parents were sitting behind her).  The girl was just fifteen, and she was thrown back by the blast. . . .
(From "The Fountain House," pp. 97-107, also published in English in a slightly different form in the August 21, 2009 issue of The New Yorker.)

She's a tall, grown-up, married woman now, but she was once an orphan living with her grandmother, who had taken her in when the girl's mother disappeared. . . .   
(From "The Shadow Life," pp. 108-114.)

There is clearly someone in the house.  Walk into the bedroom: something falls in the living room.  Look for the cat: it's sitting on the little table in the front hall, its ears pricked up; it clearly heard something, too.  Walk into the living room: a scrap of paper has fallen, all by itself, from the piano, with someone's phone number on it, you can't tell whose.  It just flew off the piano soundlessly and lies on the carpet, white and alone. . . . 
        Someone isn't being careful, thinks the woman who lives here.  Someone isn't even trying to hide anymore.  
        A person can be afraid of rodents, insects, little ants in the bath, even a lonely cockroach that's stumbled into your apartment in a drugged state, fleeing the disinfection campaign at the neighbors'—which is to say, he's just standing naked and defenseless, in plain view.  But a person can be afraid of anything when she's alone with her cat and everyone has departed, all her old family, leaving this little human roach completely by herself, unprotected. . . .   
(From "There's Someone in the House," pp. 124-138.)

--From There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, a collection of short fiction by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, selected and translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers (Penguin Books, 2009).

Fiction by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Yasunari Kawabata, and Louise Erdrich

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This is what happened.  An unmarried woman in her thirties implored her mother to leave their studio apartment for one night so she could bring home a lover.  
        This so-called lover bounced between two households, his mother's and his wife's, and he had an overripe daughter of fourteen to consider as well.  About his work at the laboratory he constantly fretted but would brag to anyone who listened about the imminent promotion that never materialized.  The insatiable appetite he displayed at office parties, where he stuffed himself, was the result of an undiagnosed diabetes that enslaved him to thirst and hunger and lacquered him with pasty skin, thick glasses, and dandruff.  A fat, balding man-child of forty-two with a dead-end job and ruined health--this was the treasure our unmarried thirtysomething brought to her apartment for a night of love. . . . 
--From There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories, a collection by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, selected and translated from the Russian by Anna Summers (Penguin Books, 2013).

Even when he reached Kamakura and the Engakuji Temple, Kikuji did not know whether or not he would go to the tea ceremony.  He was already late.
        He received an announcement whenever Kurimoto Chikako offered tea at the inner cottage of the Engakuji.  He had not once gone since his father's death, however.  He thought of the announcements as no more than formal gestures in memory of his father.  
        This time there had been a postscript: she wanted him to meet a young lady to whom she was giving tea lessons.
        As he read it, Kikuji thought of Chikako's birthmark.  
        Had he been eight, perhaps, or nine?  He had been taken by his father to visit Chikako, and they had found her in the breakfast room. . . . 
--From Thousand Cranes, a short novel by Yasunari Kawabata, originally published in Japanese as Sembazuru, translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker, with drawings by Fumi Komatsu (Wideview/Perigee, G. P. Putnam's Sons/The Putnam Publishing Group, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1959).

He was the second, or perhaps the third, Nero owned by my grandparents.  With a grocery store that included a butcher shop and a slaughterhouse, they could feed as many dogs as they liked.  Nero, a mixture of fierce breeds in a line known locally as guard dogs, was valued for his strength, his formidable jaws, and his resonant bark.  At night, he was turned loose to guard the cash register in the front of the shop, where he paced the waxed linoleum, a ghostly white.  Other unbanked valuables were kept in a safe in my grandfather's bedroom.  He slept behind a locked door with my grandmother on one side of him and a loaded gun on the other.  This was not a place where a child got up at night to ask for a glass of water. . . .   
--From "Nero," a short story by Louise Erdrich, The New Yorker (May 7, 2012), pp. 60-67.