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

~
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

~
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

~
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

~
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

~ 
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

~
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

~
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.