Lorrie Moore's Birds of America

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What should she say? It must be the most unendurable thing to lose a child. Shouldn't he say something of this? It was his turn to say something.

But he would not. And when they finally reached her classroom, she turned to him in the doorway and, taking a package from her purse, said simply, in a reassuring way, "We always have cookies in class."

Now he beamed at her with such relief that she knew she had for once said the right thing. It filled her with affection for him. Perhaps, she thought, that was where affection began: in an unlikely phrase, in a moment of someone's having unexpectedly but at last said the right thing. We always have cookies in class.

(Excerpted from "Agnes of Iowa," which originally appeared in Elle. This quote is on page 88 of the Vintage paperback.)


From Birds of America, short stories by Lorrie Moore (1998).

What a great collection. I was going to type out more of my favorite segments, but there were just too many. Seriously.

Two stories from Guess Again by Bernard Cooper

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Guess Again, short stories by Bernard Cooper (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

"Exterior Decoration" (originally published--in slightly different form--on August 25, 1999 in The LA Weekly): "Standing at the living room window, Ray looked up from his morning coffee and saw that the garage door of the house across the street, which just yesterday had been a shade of beige, was now painted a sumptuous red. Ray froze mid-sip. He suspected that Cliff, still asleep in their bed, had sneaked out and done it in the middle of the night." (pp. 140-152 in paperback)

"A Man in the Making" (pp. 125-139 in paperback)

Three stories and an essay from The Saint Ann's Review

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These are all continued in the Summer/Fall 2008 issue of The Saint Ann's Review.

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Now, if I may be permitted another small comment on a matter so large as art, I only wish that, in casting me as the pedantic, spinsterish anti-heroine in your book, you'd given me a fuller head of hair; baldness in women is so difficult, so tragic, that I think you, as a writer, might have misstepped in failing to imagine my character's suffering sufficiently. But, no matter—the book was hilarious and at one of our Friday seminars everyone in our department concluded that your fame was indeed well deserved after we'd read and exhaustively discussed it, the book I mean, from the first sentence to the copy accompanying your author photo. Do you remember our Friday seminars?

(From the short story "Eleven, the Spelunker" by Diane Greco, pp. 12-24)

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She had been sitting at a table in the evening, having a drink. She recalled feeling very much like a vulnerable woman, sitting at that table alone—she felt it described her well—that was how someone watching her would have put it, and it didn't matter to her to have been thought of that way. Anyone could have come up to her. She looked good—she knew it, too. Tan from the first few days of the vacation and she wore most all clothes very well. She had never had a problem with weight and she thought of that as a talent which had a certain shelf-life—eventually it would give out, it would become exhausted, and she intended to use it while she could. She was having a Corona. She was a woman who could drink beer. She always felt this was a skill, too. And then this man, wide-cheeked, narrow-jawed, extremely athletic, extremely masculine, salt-and-pepper stubble on a kind face, asked her if she'd seen a billiards ball roll under her table.

(From the short story "An Overqualified Woman" by Peter Levine, pp. 131-144)

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Whether you like it or not, that's not the problem with us. It's the lint trap. Or at least, with her it's the lint trap.

It was on a Sunday. I put my clothes in the dryer and walked out of the utility room.

"Did you clean out the lint trap?" she asked.

How many times has she asked me that? She never gets tired of asking me, but I'm tired of answering. She knows the answer and she knows my position.

"Did you?" she asked again. "The lint can catch fire."

(From the short story "Trap" by Glen Pourciau, pp. 154-158)

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Earlier in the day my brother and I had asked my grandfather if it was all right to put on the casket a large photograph of my father and his motorcycle, a red and white Yamaha YZF R-1, one of the fastest superbikes in production. He agreed, and that was the first thing you saw upon entering the room: this photo of my father smiling behind the machine that killed him.

(From the essay "Of Men and Motorcycles: An Inquiry into the Death of My Father" by William Giraldi, pp. 183-195)

"Late Afternoon" by Joanne Page

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The phone rings. I hold the phone to her ear while she says goodbye.
I can hear someone crying at the other end. She does not say who.

"Late Afternoon," a poem by Joanne Page, is continued in Queen's Quarterly (114/4, Winter 2007), pp. 530-533. The poem, which is about Bronwen Wallace, is accompanied by photographs of the letter and bracelet Page describes in the text.

"Pulse" by Grete Tartler

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In Athens a woman threw herself
in front of a train
as people were rushing to the Olympics
and all shouted, "No, no!
Couldn't she find a better time?" . . .

This is an excerpt from "Pulse," a poem by Grete Tartler (translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Grete Tartler). It was originally published in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review (Winter 2010) and reprinted today (Friday, February 4, 2011) at Poetry Daily. The full poem can be found here.

Short fiction by Christopher Boucher

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. . . The van was parked right out front. I could see that the family was of Asian descent. The man was talking on his cell phone. The wife was reading a magazine. The kids—one boy and one girl—were sipping juice boxes in the back seat.

Soon I began seeing that van everywhere: parked outside the organic grocery store where I worked, idling outside the hospital when I went to pick up some test results.

Then the family showed up at Bowling Night, in the lane right next to my team’s. I turned to see the mother writing on the score sheet and the daughter swinging her feet from the chair. I watched the father—a man of about forty, I’d say, with longish black hair—pick up the ball and stare down the lane. I could tell from his delivery that he’d bowled before. Sure enough, he knocked down eight pins.

I was furious—enough was enough. This was a league night! When the man sat down I leaned back and whispered, “Hey.” . . .


"Family," a short story by Christopher Boucher, is continued online in Web Conjunctions.

Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules

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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, a collection of stories edited and introduced by David Sedaris (Simon & Schuster, 2005).

I read this as slowly as I possibly could, hoping that he'd have a new collection of essays out by the time I finished, but no dice.

Some of the stories that really stuck out to me were ones I'd already read (e.g., "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri; "People Like That Are the Only People Here" by Lorrie Moore--who every once in a while has a wonderful, perfect sentence; and "Cosmopolitan" by Akhil Sharma) but this was an interesting collection.

Among others, Sedaris also included "Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired" by Richard Yates, "Gryphon" by Charles Baxter, "The Garden Party" by Katherine Mansfield, "Half a Grapefruit" by Alice Munro, "Applause, Applause" by Jean Thompson, "Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out" by Patricia Highsmith, "Song of the Shirt, 1941" by Dorothy Parker, "The Girl with the Blackened Eye" by Joyce Carol Oates, "Revelation" by Flannery O'Connor, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel, "Irish Girl" by Tim Johnston, and "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff.

Side note: Purchase of this book helps support 826NYC, a nonprofit tutoring center in Brooklyn, New York.