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. 

Fiction by Elena Ferrante, Kiara Brinkman, Rumena Bužarovska, and Hiromi Kawakami, and poetry by Louise Glück and José Antonio Rodríguez

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Day and night come
hand in hand like a boy and a girl
pausing only to eat wild berries out of a dish
painted with pictures of birds.
—From Winter Recipes from the Collective, poems by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). This section is from "Poem," pp. 3-4. My favorite poem in this collection is "The Denial of Death," pp. 5-11.

Don't misunderstand me, I love a good poem
Like half my Facebook friends, one that transports you
To a corner of the soul you didn't know was there
Because you couldn’t find the precise metaphor,
Even if you felt it, like that time my parents saw
A local news story of an older woman asking for help
With an ailing husband, and I volunteered to drive them . . .
—From "Shelter," a poem by José Antonio Rodríguez, The New Yorker (April 6, 2020), pp. 48-49.

Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly. The sentence was uttered under his breath, in the apartment that my parents, newly married, had bought at the top of Via San Giacomo dei Capri, in Rione Alto. Everything—the spaces of Naples, the blue light of a frigid February, those words—remained fixed. But I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story . . .
—From The Lying Life of Adults, a novel by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2020).

Ronan's mother made him and his brother practice acting bad so it would look real when the nanny from the TV show came. The boys practiced punching at each other and biting, fighting over broken plastic toys that neither of them played with anymore. Their mother said that this was her chance to be discovered. National fucking TV.
        Ronan, she said, let me see you do a temper tantrum.
        I'm tired, he told her—because he was ten, too old for tantrums. It wouldn't be realistic.
—From "If You Can Hear Me Thinking," a short story by Kiara Brinkman, One Story, Volume 6, Number 1 (April 20, 2007).

Nenad lay down on his bed and turned his face to the wall, whimpering quietly now. He didn't react when I touched him. I sat on the side of the bed and gave him a lecture on stealing. I told him that if he stole things, he'd wind up in jail. But since he didn't react to either my caresses or my words I left him there and went to the living room. Gene was sitting staring at a blank TV screen.
        "Maybe you shouldn't have beaten him so hard," I said. "He's really upset."
—From My Husband, stories by Rumena Bužarovska, translated from the Macedonian by Paul Filev (Dalkey Archive Press, 2019). This segment is from "Genes," pp. 33-54.

A white cloth was lying at the foot of a zelkova tree. When I walked over and picked it up, I saw a child underneath. 
—From People from My Neighborhood, stories by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen (Soft Skull Press, 2021).

The Fall 2021 issue of the Apple Valley Review

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The Fall 2021 issue of the Apple Valley Review features short fiction by Alice Wilson, Alex Haber, L. Mack, Zulaikha Yusuf (translated from the Arabic by Essam M. Al-Jassim), and Mariana Villas-Boas; a novel excerpt by Josh Emmons; poetry by Daniel Bourne, Gail Peck, DS Maolalai, Alaíde Foppa (translated from the Spanish by Dana Delibovi), Mary Crow, Julia Lisella, Judith Harris, Susan Johnson, and Robert Herschbach; and a cover painting by Russian artist Ivan Shishkin. 

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 Olga Zilberbourg, Weike Wang, Jeanette Winterson, Camille Bordas, and Clare Sestanovich

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My mother was born in Leningrad, after the Great Patriotic War. When she was seven years old, she became addicted to shooting practice. The range was housed in the basement of the five-story residential building where she lived. The basement, a remodeled air-raid shelter, was a long, low-ceilinged room, filled with cigarette smoke and the smell of stale beer. My mother frequented the place on her way home from first grade.
—From Like Water and Other Stories, a collection of short stories by Olga Zilberbourg (WTAW Press, 2019). This section is from "My Mother at the Shooting Range," pp. 36-39, and was first published in J Journal: New Writing on Justice (3.1, Spring 2010). 

In Shanghai, they met up with his wife's cousin, who lived alone and worked in a pie shop. Here the prepaid tour ended and they said goodbye to Karl and the others. His wife had booked a room at the Langham. There were no light switches, just a control pad by the bed. The toilet lid lifted each time he passed. In Shanghai, they ate more. Hot pot, grilled fish, barbecue, fried noodles, soup noodles, soup dumplings, regular dumplings, an upscale KFC.
—From "The Trip," a short story by Weike Wang, The New Yorker (November 18, 2019), pp. 62-67.

Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn’t matter what. She was in the white corner and that was that.
        She hung out the largest sheets on the windiest days. She wanted the Mormons to knock on the door. At election time in a Labour mill town she put a picture of the Conservative candidate in the window.
        She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies.

                Enemies were: The Devil (in his many forms)
                                             Next Door
                                             Sex (in its many forms)
                                             Slugs
                 Friends were:  God
                                             Our dog
                                             Auntie Madge
                                             The Novels of Charlotte Brontë
                                             Slug pellets

and me, at first. I had been brought in to join her in a tag match against the Rest of the World. She had a mysterious attitude towards the begetting of children; it wasn’t that she couldn't do it, more that she didn't want to do it. She was very bitter about the Virgin Mary getting there first. So she did the next best thing and arranged for a foundling. That was me.
—From Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a novel by Jeanette Winterson (Grove Press, 1985).

All I said was that she must like beige a lot. I was trying to put my finger on why I disliked her so much. Audrey. My brother’s new girlfriend. I thought maybe it was the different shades of beige she’d been wearing all week.
        “You must really like beige,” I said, and she said: “What do you mean?”
        “Your pants,” I said, “your shirts—all beige. Or . . . oatmeal, maybe.” “Oatmeal” sounded less aggressive. I’d been told I was a little mean at times, in my choice of words.
        “My pants are green,” Audrey said.
        “Jeanne is right,” my brother said, and it was the first time he’d agreed with me all year. “Your pants aren’t green, babe.”
        Just like that, Audrey found out that she was color-blind.
—From "Only Orange," a short story by Camille Bordas, The New Yorker (December 23, 2019), pp. 76-83.

The summer Val turned twenty-five, her sort-of stepbrother, Zeke, came to live with her in New York. He was nineteen, and when he appeared at her front door, two pairs of shoes dangling from her backpack, drinking greedily from a can of Coke, she was meeting him for the first time. Decades ago, Zeke's mother had been married to Val's father.
—From Objects of Desire, a collection of stories by Clare Sestanovich (Knopf, 2021). This section is from "Wants and Needs," pp. 139-156.

A documentary film by Loira Limbal, fiction by Natsuko Imamura, Laura Imai Messina, and Banana Yoshimoto, and poetry by Sharon Olds

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Through the Night is a cinema verité portrait of three working New York mothers whose lives intersect at a 24-hour daycare center: a mother working the overnight shift as an essential worker at a hospital; another holding down three jobs to support her family; and a woman who for over two decades has cared for the children of parents with nowhere else to turn.
—From promotional materials for Through the Night, a documentary film by Loira Limbal. It aired locally on PBS on the series POV. The website for the documentary contains current links if you would like to rent or buy the film. 

On certain days, I've seen the Woman in the Purple Skirt purchase her cream bun from the bakery, walk through the shopping district, and head straight for the park. The time is just past three in the afternoon. The evergreen oaks that border the south side of the park provide shade for the Exclusively Reserved Seat. The Woman in the Purple Skirt sits down in the middle of the bench and proceeds to eat her cream bun, holding one hand cupped underneath it, in case any of the custard filling spills onto her lap.
—From The Woman in the Purple Skirt, a novel by Natsuko Imamura, translated from the Japanese by Lucy North (Penguin Books, 2021). Originally published in Japanese as Murasaki no sukato no onna (Tokyo, Japan: Asahi Shimbun Publications, Inc., 2019).

"So," the voice began, between regular inhalations on a cigarette, "there's this phone booth in a garden, on a hill in the middle of nowhere. The phone isn't connected to anything, but your voice is carried away with the wind. I'll say, Hi, Yoko, how are you? And I feel myself becoming the person I was before, my wife listening to me from the kitchen, busy preparing breakfast or dinner, me grumbling that the coffee's burned my tongue. 
        "Yesterday evening I was reading my grandson the story of Peter Pan, the little flying boy who loses his shadow and the girl who sews it back onto the soles of his feet. And, you know, I think that's what we're doing when we go up that hill to Suzuki-san's garden: we're trying to get our shadows back."
—From The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World, a novel by Laura Imai Messina, translated from the Italian by Lucy Rand (The Overlook Press, an imprint of Abrams, 2021). This segment is from pages 16-17 in hardcover.  

Wherever he went, Hitoshi always had a little bell with him, attached to the case he kept his bus pass in. Even though it was just a trinket, something I gave him before we were in love, it was destined to remain at his side until the last.
—From "Moonlight Shadow," a short story published along with the short novel Kitchen, both by Banana Yoshimoto, translated from the Japanese by Megan Backus (Grove Press, 2006). 

She was so small I would scan the crib a half-second
to find her, face-down in a corner, limp
as something gently flung down, or fallen . . .
—From "Her First Week," a poem by Sharon Olds, from her collection The Wellspring (Knopf, 1996, p. 44). 

Fiction by Etgar Keret, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Maki Kashimada; an essay by David Sedaris; and three poems

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Summers spent practicing in the apartment

stairwell: hand on the bannister, one foot after

another. Did I ever tell you I couldn't walk

until I was three and then sort of dragged

myself up and downstairs until I was seven

or eight? . . . 

—From "Achingly Beautiful How the Sky Blooms Umber at the End of the Day, Through the Canopy," a poem by Gabrielle Calvocoressi (Poem-a-Day, June 15, 2015, Academy of American Poets). 

SAD COW

A. had a recurring dream. He dreamed it almost every night, but in the morning, when Goodman or one of the instructors woke him and asked if he remembered what he had dreamed, he was always quick to say no. This wasn't because the dream was scary or embarrassing, it was just a stupid dream in which he was standing on top of a grassy hill beside an easel, painting the pastoral landscape in watercolors. The landscape in the dream was breathtaking, and since A. had come to the institution as a baby, the grassy hill was probably an imaginary place he had thought up or a real place he had seen in a picture or short film in one of his classes. The only thing that kept the dream from being completely pleasant was a huge cow with human eyes that was always grazing right next to A.'s easel.

—From "Tabula Rasa," a short story by Etgar Keret. It appeared (pp. 29-44) in his story collection Fly Already, which was translated into English by Sondra Silverston, Nathan Englander, Jessica Cohen, Miriam Shlesinger, and Yardenne Greenspan (Riverhead Books, 2019). The collection was originally published in Hebrew, in somewhat different form, as A Glitch at the Edge of the Galaxy (Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, 2018). "Tabula Rasa" was first published in English as "A.: Only Through Death Will You Learn Your True Identity" in a Fiction Issue of Wired (December 13, 2016).

The room's a bit dark, the lights are off. The heat feels excessive even though in general I tend to prefer the heat. I start to take off my jacket and scarf right away. There's just one other patient waiting, another woman trapped with me in that room. She looks about twenty years older than I am. She watches me carefully, without warmth in her eyes. Her gaze is impenetrable. I can't manage to remove the scarf, it's gotten tangled up with my necklace. How ridiculous. The woman keeps looking at me as if there were a screen between us, as if I were a person on television.

—From Whereabouts, a novel by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf, 2021). The book was originally written and published in Italian as Dove Mi Trovo (Milan, Italy: Ugo Guanda Editore S.r.l., 2018) and translated into English by the author. This section is from page 20 of the hardcover.

Taichi, however, was unaware of her thoughts. Having boarded the bullet train, his four bad limbs bumped against the seats here and there, until finally he came to the one designated on his ticket and sat down with a plump. If he were anyone else, his failure to show reserve with respect to his disability might, far from engendering sympathy, have invited nothing short of annoyed frowns. But he was oblivious to that kind of unreasonableness. He merely beckoned to her from his seat, as if his having found it by himself were some kind of great achievement. 

—From Touring the Land of the Dead, a novella by Maki Kashimada, translated from the Japanese by Haydn Trowell (Europa Editions, 2021). Also included in the book is a second novella, Ninety-Nine Kisses. The pair were originally published in Japanese as Meido Meguri; 99 no seppun (Tokyo, Japan: Kawade Shobo Shinsha Ltd. Publishers, 2012).

My sister is not dating anyone—a good thing, as she’s got way too much time on her hands. And that, I think, is the No. 1 reason so many relationships fail. Too much free time, and too much time together. I’m normally away from Hugh between four and six months a year, and when the pandemic cancelled the tours I had scheduled I panicked. We were in New York at the time, so I sought out his old friend Carol. “What’s he really like?” I asked her. “I think I sort of knew once, but that was twenty-five years ago.”
—From "Pearls," an essay by David Sedaris, The New Yorker (May 17, 2021), pp. 20-22. 

Slowly the great birds rise into the soft golden air above the village.

—From "The Great Birds," a poem by Kenneth Patchen, Poetry (May 1955).

It is 1992. Weekends, we paw at cheap
silverware at yard sales.
—From "Naturalization," a poem by Jenny Xie (Poem-a-Day, August 28, 2017, Academy of American Poets).