An essay by Devon Geyelin, novels by Yūko Tsushima and Amy Tan, a memoir by Amy Bloom, and a poem by Jane Hirshfield

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I first wrote this while I sat in bed in the months after, once he wasn't there anymore and I was upset. Initially it was very long, maybe a hundred pages, or more than that. It had a part where we were friends, and a part where we dated, and a part where we stopped, and then the attack. 
—From "Friendship," an essay by Devon Geyelin, The Paris Review (online July 25, 2023). 

The apartment had windows on all sides.
          I spent a year there, with my little daughter, on the top floor of an old four-storey office building. We had the whole fourth floor to ourselves, plus the rooftop terrace. At street level there was a camera shop; the second and third floors were both divided into two rented offices.
—From Territory of Light, a short, atmospheric novel by Yuko Tsushima, translated from the Japanese by Geraldine Harcourt (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). (Note: If you are looking for this book or others by the same author, her name in English is alternately stylized as Yuko Tsushima and Yūko Tsushima.) The English translation was previously published in Great Britain (Penguin Books Ltd., 2018), and this quote is from a paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2019. An unabridged audiobook version of the English translation, narrated by Rina Takasaki, is also available (Macmillan Audio, 2019). 

Territory of Light was originally published in twelve parts in the Japanese literary monthly Gunzō (July 1978-June 1979). The story takes place over the course of a year, and the release of the twelve chapters marked the months in real time. It was then published in book form in Japan as Hikari no Ryōbun (Kodansha Ltd., 1979). 

Helen thinks all her decisions are always right, but really, she is only lucky. For over fifty years I have seen this happen, how her foolish thinking turns into good fortune. It was like that at lunch yesterday. "Winnie-ah," she said. "Have more chicken." I told Helen I did not want to eat any more funeral leftovers—five days was enough. So we went shopping at Happy Super, deciding what new things to eat for last night's dinner.
          Helen picked out a flat fish, pom-pom fish, she called it, only a dollar sixty-nine a pound, bargain bin. 
          And I said, "This kind of bargain you don't want. Look at his eye, shrunken in and cloudy-looking. That fish is already three days old."
          But Helen stared at that fish eye and said she saw nothing wrong. So I picked up that fish and felt its body slide between my fingers, a fish that had slipped away from life long time ago. Helen said it was a good sign—a juicy, tender fish!
          . . .
          She bought that three-day-old fish, the dinner I ate at her house last night. . . . 
          I tell you, that fish made me so mad. It was sweet. It was tender. Only one dollar sixty-nine a pound. I started to think, Maybe Helen went back to Happy Super and exchanged that fish. But then I thought, Helen is not that clever. And that's when I remembered something. Even though Helen is not smart, even though she was born poor, even though she has never been pretty, she has always had luck pour onto her plate, even spill from the mouth of a three-day-old fish. 
—From The Kitchen God's Wife, a novel by Amy Tan (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1991). The section above is from the beginning of chapter 3, pages 67-68 of the mass market paperback (Ivy Books/Ballantine Books/Random House, 1992). The novel was reissued by Penguin in 2006.

When we moved to a small Connecticut village in 2014, Brian was invited to join a men's book club. He was dubious because they seemed to prefer nonfiction and he did not, but he was pleased to be asked and he went regularly. He suggested a novel whenever it was his turn to suggest. They asked him why he wanted to be in their book club and he said, I love a good read and I love intimacy. He was pleased that they looked shocked, and he felt that he'd announced himself properly. 
—From In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Amy Bloom (Random House, 2022). This segment appears on page 15 of the hardcover. The audiobook version, available from Random House Audio, features Amy Bloom reading the book herself. 

In Amy Bloom's memoir, she quotes the last line from "Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World," a poem by Jane Hirshfield, which begins with this: 

If the gods bring to you 
a strange and frightening creature, 
accept the gift 
as if it were one you had chosen.

Poetry by Aliyah Cotton and Roxanne Cardona, and short fiction by Haruki Murakami, Lucas Flatt, and Christopher Ghattas

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For example, I puffed on my inhaler
and watched the unnamed smoke creep
under my bedroom door as the music and
the loud voices boomed down the hall.
I knew never to call 911.
—From "evidence for the necessity of my removal by child protective services," a poem by Aliyah Cotton, Rust & Moth (Spring 2023).  

That Sunday, I went to my girlfriend's house to pick her up. We went on dates pretending we were going to the library to study, so I always put various study-related items in my shoulder bag to keep up the facade. Like a novice criminal making up a flimsy alibi. 
          I rang the bell over and over, but no one answered. I paused for a while, then rang it again, repeatedly, until I finally heard someone moving slowly toward the door. It was my girlfriend's older brother. 
—From "With the Beatles," a short story from First Person Singular, a collection of eight stories by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021). The book was originally published in Tokyo, Japan, as Ichininsho Tansu (Bungei Shunju Ltd., 2020). A slightly different version of "With the Beatles" was published, with an illustration by Adrian Tomine, in The New Yorker (February 17 and 24, 2020). The excerpt above is from the hardcover book (p. 93). 

Of course, with the students, they’re mostly not dumb enough to think they’ll have writing careers, or else they've self-published fifteen sci-fi novels since they graduated high school two months ago. (That guy doesn't seem the least bit anxious; he's got deadlines to meet.) Once upon a time, I smoked pot and if I wanted to describe a flowering pocomoke crepe myrtle shimmering fuchsia in a dry ditch, I did it without looking up "flowering bushes" and wondering where all the time went.
—From "Reflections After Googling 'How to Be Less Anxious About My Writing Career' and Finding the Same Bullshit I Tell My Composition Students," fiction by Lucas Flatt, Maudlin House (June 22, 2023).  

My father says my problems are not problems. 
          What do you know? I think.
          "What do you mean?" I say.
          He turns to me. He grumbles about his car engine and his dead wife and something called a praws tate.
          "My dead mother, you mean."
—From "Plums," a piece of flash fiction by Christopher Ghattas, StreetLit (April 21, 2023). 

I am early. Take out my keys. Three women at the end of their evening's
work, in a tangle of sprawl, languish on the hood of a nearby car. 
—From "Welcome to Summer School," a poem by Roxanne Cardona, San Antonio Review (June 21, 2023).  

Short stories and flash fiction by Parker Young, novels by Barbara Kingsolver and Gabriel García Márquez, and a bonus book to read again

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I decided to throw the chicken sandwich away but couldn't bring myself to touch it, the first step in the throwing-away process proved impossible, so I sat there while it sat there too, me in my chair, the sandwich on my plate, both of us in the kitchen listening to my wife talk or cry softly in the bedroom, where I pretended to sleep every night but couldn’t for no reason, no reason at all.
—From "Chicken Marriage Sandwich," a story by Parker Young, Always Crashing Magazine (May 22, 2022).  

In Bora Bora, crabs do the work of rodents at night, patrolling the gutters with a percussive, mechanical menace. Dogs sleep inches from the road; it looks like they've been struck down by careless drivers. I almost hit some of them myself in our rented Fiat Panda because I was attempting to learn, under [my brother-in-law] Harrison's tutelage, how to operate a manual transmission. I made the Panda lurch erratically around the road that circumvolves the island, like a model train powered by a sketchy generator, which was pretty close to the real situation mechanically, as Harrison kept trying to explain to me by repeating the story of the clutch and the drivetrain, the clutch and the drivetrain, a meaningless story, impossible to visualize, which I never even began to understand. While everyone else on the island only appeared to be driving recklessly (it was ultimately a sign of their mastery), I was actually doing it, because I had too much to think about all at once—the clutch, the gas, my error in taking this one-week job as Harrison's assistant—and it was embarrassing.  
—From "Disappearances," a story by Parker Young, from his debut collection of short fiction, Cheap Therapist Says You're Insane (Future Tense Books, 2023). I originally discovered this book via a list of new fiction, which led me to read "Chicken Marriage Sandwich," which was published in Always Crashing (see above). I liked the story so much that I ordered a copy of Cheap Therapist Says You're Insane. (Interestingly, the version of "Chicken Marriage Sandwich" that appears in the book is quite different. I definitely recommend reading the version in Always Crashing, even if you do read, or have already read, the collection.) This story, "Disappearances," is on pages 93-101 of the book. This particular segment appears on pages 94-95. I was making a list of my other favorite stories from the collection, but it ended up being too long. (I will single out "Repentance Rebate" and "Two Bathtubs in Memphis.") 

First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they've always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let's just say out of it.
          On any other day they'd have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there she'd be, little bleach-blonde smoking her Pall Malls, hanging on that railing like she's captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it's going down. This is an eighteen-year-old girl we're discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets. The day she failed to show, it fell to Nance Peggot to go bang on the door, barge inside, and find her passed out on the bathroom floor with her junk all over the place and me already coming out. A slick fish-colored hostage picking up grit from the vinyl tile, worming and shoving around because I'm still inside the sack that babies float in, pre-real-life.
          Mr. Peggot was outside idling his truck, headed for evening service, probably thinking about how much of his life he'd spent waiting on women. His wife would have told him the Jesusing could hold on a minute, first she needed to go see if the little pregnant gal had got herself liquored up again. Mrs. Peggot being a lady that doesn't beat around the bushes and if need be, will tell Christ Jesus to sit tight and keep his pretty hair on. She came back out yelling for him to call 911 because a poor child is in the bathroom trying to punch himself out of a bag.
—From Demon Copperhead, a novel by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper, 2022), winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.
          He found the corpse covered with a blanket on the campaign cot where he had always slept, and beside it was a stool with the developing tray he had used to vaporize the poison. On the floor, tied to a leg of the cot, lay the body of a black Great Dane with a snow-white chest, and next to him were the crutches.  
—From Love in the Time of Cholera, a novel by Gabriel García Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988). The book was originally published in Colombia as El amor en los tiempos del cólera in 1985.  

Bonus book to read again: 

That was the spring that Ian's brother fell in love. Up till then Danny had had his share of girlfriends—various decorative Peggies or Debbies to hang upon his arm—but somehow nothing had come of them. He was always getting dumped, it seemed, or sadly disillusioned. His mother had started fretting that he'd passed the point of no return and would wind up a seedy bachelor type. Now here was Lucy, slender and pretty and dressed in red, standing in the Bedloes' front hall with her back so straight, her purse held so firmly in both hands, that she seemed even smaller than she was. She seemed childlike, in fact, although Danny described her as a "woman" when he introduced her. "Mom, Dad, Ian, I'd like you to meet the woman who's changed my life." 
—From Saint Maybe, a novel by Anne Tyler (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991/Vintage reprint, 1996). 

Novels by Claire Keegan and Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, short stories by Souvankham Thammavongsa and Yoon Choi, and a bonus book to read again

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During busy times like these, Furlong made most of the deliveries himself, leaving the yardmen to bag up the next orders and cut and split the loads of felled trees the farmers brought in. Through the mornings, the saws and shovels could be heard going hard at it, but when the Angelus bell rang, at noon, the men laid down their tools, washed the black off their hands, and went round to Kehoe's, where they were fed hot dinners with soup, and fish & chips on Fridays.
          'The empty sack cannot stand,' Mrs Kehoe liked to say, standing behind her new buffet counter, slicing up the meat and dishing out the veg and mash with her long, metal spoons. 
          Gladly, the men sat down to thaw out and eat their fill before having a smoke and facing back out into the cold again. 
—From Small Things Like These, a short novel by Claire Keegan (Grove Press, 2021). It was first published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Faber & Faber Limited.

I must leave this city today and come to you. My bags are packed and the empty rooms remind me that I should have left a week ago. Musa, my driver, has slept at the security guard’s post every night since last Friday, waiting for me to wake him up at dawn so we can set out on time. But my bags still sit in the living room, gathering dust.
          I have given most of what I acquired here—furniture, electronic devices, even house fittings—to the stylists who worked in my salon. So, every night for a week now, I’ve tossed about on this bed without a television to shorten my insomniac hours.
          There’s a house waiting for me in Ife, right outside the university where you and I first met. I imagine it now, a house not unlike this one, its many rooms designed to nurture a big family: man, wife and many children. I was supposed to leave a day after my hairdryers were taken down. The plan was to spend a week setting up my new salon and furnishing the house. I wanted my new life in place before seeing you again.
—From Stay with Me, a novel by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ (Vintage, 2018). The book was originally published in hardcover in Great Britain (Canongate Books Ltd., Edinburgh) and then in the United States (Alfred A. Knopf) in 2017. 

My mother learned to speak English watching these [soap operas], and soon she started practising what she learned. When my father didn't feel like eating, she would ask who he had been eating his meals with that he had no appetite? When a sock went missing from the dryer, she would ask where it went, and when he had no answer, she would accuse him of having an affair. 
—From How to Pronounce Knife, a short story collection by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Little, Brown and Company, 2020). This book won the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize and 2021 Trillium Book Award, and it was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN America Open Book Award. The segment above is from the story "Edge of the World," which appears on pages 93-105 of the hardcover from Little, Brown in the United States. The collection is also available from McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom.

Once, before [the cancer] got so bad, she took her handbag and left. No one knew where she went. But later they found out that she had taken the 7 line to Main Street, Flushing. Even though I have never met James mother, I can picture her on that day, buying a sponge cake in the gift box and holding it by the ears. She paid the visit to Elder Huang, the optometrist, who is the matchmaker. Afterward, Mr. Huang contacted so-and-so, and so-and-so, until one day in September, Big Mother—which is my father's older brother's wife—came to our Front Gate and cried out: I'm here!

          Inside the house, we all ran around. My mother slapped every cushion on the guest sofa. She said, "Leave it, leave it," to our Miss, who was trying to pull off the dry flowers from the butterfly orchid on the glass table. She put Miss in the Back Room with Min-soo so that he would not be under Big Mother's eye-measure. She pushed me to the kitchen. Finally she opened the door as Big Mother came up the steps from the courtyard.
—From "First Language," a short story by Yoon Choi, from her collection Skinship (Knopf, 2021). This story appears on pages 44-79 of the Vintage Books trade paperback edition, 2022. This specific segment appears on page 46.  

Bonus book to read again: 

When I was a young girl in China, my grandmother told me my mother was a ghost. This did not mean my mother was dead. In those days, a ghost was anything we were forbidden to talk about. So I knew Popo wanted me to forget my mother on purpose, and this is how I came to remember nothing of her. The life that I knew began in the large house in Ningpo with the cold hallways and tall stairs. This was my uncle and auntie's family house, where I lived with Popo and my little brother. 
—From The Joy Luck Club, a novel by Amy Tan (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1989/Penguin Books, 2016). The section above is from "Scar," which is on pages 33-41 of the Penguin paperback reissued with a preface by Amy Tan in 2019 for the thirtieth anniversary of the book's publication.   

The Spring 2023 issue of the Apple Valley Review

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The Spring 2023 issue of the Apple Valley Review features short fiction by Marianna Vitale (translated from the Italian by Laura Venita Green), Nico Montoya, Anita Harag (translated from the Hungarian by Marietta Morry and Walter Burgess), Sohana Manzoor, and Kristian Radford; a lyric essay by Amy Ash; poetry in prose by Yves Bonnefoy (translated from the French by Hoyt Rogers); poetry by Ashish Kumar Singh, Susan Johnson, Laura Goldin, George HS Singer, and Liza Moore; and a cover image by Tunisian photographer Houcine Ncib. 

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. 

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen

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The dark hallway smelled of fear, so I was afraid that Mrs Olfertsen would notice it, as if I'd brought the smell with me. My body and my movements became stiff and awkward as I stood listening to her fluttering voice explaining many things and, in between the explanations, running on like an empty spool that babbled about nothing in an uninterrupted stream – about the weather, about the boy, about how tall I was for my age. She asked whether I had an apron with me, and I took my mother's out of the emptied school bag. There was a hole near the seam because there was something or other wrong with everything that my mother was responsible for, and I was touched by the sight of it. My mother was far away and I wouldn't see her for eight hours. I was among strangers – I was someone whose physical strength they'd bought for a certain number of hours each day for a certain payment. They didn't care about the rest of me. When we went out to the kitchen, Toni, the little boy, came running up in his pajamas. 'Good morning, Mummy,' he said sweetly, leaning against his mother's legs and giving me a hostile look. The woman gently pulled herself free from him and said, 'This is Tove, say hello to the nice lady.' Reluctantly he put out his hand and when I took it, he said threateningly, 'You have to do everything I say or else I'll shoot you.' His mother laughed loudly and showed me a tray with cups and a teapot, and asked me to fix the tea and come into the living room with it.
—From Youth, chapter 1, by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally. This segment is on pages 103-104 of the American hardcover version of The Copenhagen Trilogy.  

The Copenhagen Trilogy is a compilation of three shorter books by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman (Penguin Random House in Great Britain, 2020, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States, 2021). Childhood and Youth were first published in Copenhagen, Denmark, as Barndom and Ungdom (Gyldendal, 1967). Dependency was first published in Copenhagen as Gift (Gyldendal, 1971).

The New York Times included The Copenhagen Trilogy on its list of the ten best books of 2021, writing that "Ditlevsen's gorgeous memoirs, first published in Denmark in the 1960s and '70s and collected here in a single volume, detail her hardscrabble upbringing, career path and merciless addictions: a powerful account of the struggle to reconcile art and life. She joined the working ranks at 14, became a renowned poet by her early 20s, and found herself, after two failed marriages, wedded to a psychopathic doctor and hopelessly dependent on opioids by her 30s. Yet for all the dramatic twists of her life, these books together project a stunning clarity, humor and candidness, casting light not just on the world's harsh realities but on the inexplicable impulses of our secret selves." A full review of the book, by Megan O'Grady, appeared in the New York Times on January 26, 2021.

"Before Rehab," an astonishing excerpt from Dependency, written by Tove Ditlevsen and translated from the Danish by Michael Favala Goldman (credited as Michael Goldman), appeared in the Fall 2018 issue of the Apple Valley Review. This excerpt, Chapter 5 of Dependency, is on pages 341-348 of the hardcover edition of The Copenhagen Trilogy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).

In an essay in The New Yorker, Hilton Als wrote that "Dependency strikes me as an inspired title for this volume, which is called Gift in Danish—a word that can mean 'marriage' or 'poison.' Ditlevsen has a dependency not only on Demerol but on the question of what it means to be a wife while also a lovesick daughter and an artist." The essay, "Tove Ditlevsen's Art of Estrangement," appeared in the Books section of The New Yorker in the issue for February 15 & 22, 2021.

Als also said, "Don’t think yourself odd if, after reading the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen's romantic, spiritually macabre, and ultimately devastating collection of memoirs . . . you spend hours, if not days, in a reverie of alienation." No comment about that. 

In my opinion, The Copenhagen Trilogy is even more phenomenal when paired with the unabridged audiobook from Macmillan Audio. I recently read the book again, in addition to listening to the audiobook, and the narration by Stine Wintlev brings the book to life in a new way. The audiobook is available directly from Macmillan Audio as well as from OverDrive, Audible, Spotify, SoundCloud, and elsewhere.

THE COPENHAGEN TRILOGY

Childhood, Youth, Dependency

By Tove Ditlevsen

Translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Available online from Macmillan in hardcover, trade paperback, e-book, and digital audio 

Fiction by Graham Greene, Miriam Cohen, T. Coraghessan Boyle, and Jonas Eika, and a collection of cityscapes by Paul Madonna

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Scobie took a Mende grammar from the bookcase: it was tucked away in the bottom shelf where its old untidy cover was least conspicuous. In the upper shelves were the flimsy rows of Louise's authors—not-quite-so-young modern poets and the novels of Virginia Woolf. He couldn't concentrate: it was too hot and his wife's absence was like a garrulous companion in the room reminding him of his responsibility. A fork fell on the floor and he watched Ali surreptitiously wipe it on his sleeve, watched him with affection: they had been together fifteen years—a year longer than his marriage—a long time to keep a servant. He had been "small boy" first, then assistant steward in the days when one kept four servants, now he was plain steward. After each leave Ali would be on the landing-stage waiting to organize his luggage with three or four ragged carriers. In the intervals of leave many people tried to steal Ali's services, but he had never yet failed to be waiting—except once when he had been in prison. There was no disgrace about prison; it was an obstacle that no one could avoid for ever.
—From The Heart of the Matter, a novel by Graham Greene (William Heinemann in London/The Viking Press in the United States, 1948). I was listening to an unabridged audiobook version narrated by Joseph Porter (Blackstone Publishing, 2011). Please note: this book contains some racist language that will be considered offensive now. The Heart of the Matter is set in Sierra Leone during World War II and was first published in 1948. 

Yael's parents ask if she has any questions, and she does, but she suspects they aren't the right ones. She wants to know if she will have two toothbrushes now, or if she will bring the same one back and forth, its bristles wrapped in shredding tissue to keep from getting germy. Also, she is curious about when a divorce starts: if it happens all at once, or in stages, the way people are engaged for a while before they are married. She wants to ask if later on that night they will have dinner together, or if the divorce has made that, today, impossible.
—From "Bad Words," a short story by Miriam Cohen, from her collection Adults and Other Children (Ig Publishing, 2020). This story appears on pages 31-45.  

Clover was back in the room, the baby flung over one shoulder. She was wearing an old Cramps T-shirt she liked to sleep in and nothing else. I might have found this sexy to one degree or another but for the fact that I wasn't at my best in the morning and I'd seen her naked save for one rock-and-roll memento T-shirt for something like a thousand consecutive mornings now. "It's six-fifteen," she said. I said nothing. My eyes eased shut. I heard her at the closet, and in the dream that crashed down on me in that instant she metamorphosed from a rippling human female with a baby slung over her shoulder to a great shining bird springing from the brink of a precipice and sailing on great shining wings into the void. I woke to the baby. On the bed. Beside me. "You change her," my wife said. "You feed her. I'm late as it is."
—From "The Lie," a short story by T. Coraghessan Boyle, The New Yorker (April 14, 2008). Stephen Colbert read this story for Selected Shorts, and it is included in Selected Shorts: Even More Laughs. The compilation, which is available in various locations such as Audible and OverDrive, also includes "The Spray" by Jonathan Lethem, "The Swim Team" by Miranda July, and other stories.

I arrived in Copenhagen sweaty and halfway out of myself after an extremely fictional flight. Frankly, I would use that word for any air travel, but on this trip I had, shortly after takeoff, fallen into a light feverish daze in which I relived a series of flights I had taken earlier in my life.
—From "Alvin," a short story by Jonas Eika, translated from the Danish by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, The New Yorker (April 19, 2021), pp. 52-59. 

"This new guy I'm dating is driving me crazy. His reply to everything is, 'Oh, yeah, I'm famous for that.'"
          "Uh. I know what you mean. I dated a guy who did the same thing. And it would always be to the most ridiculous stuff, like, you'd say, 'I hate when people leave the cap off the toothpaste.' And he'd say, 'Oh, yeah, I'm famous for that.'"
          "Ha! That's Jeffrey to a T! As if anyone could be famous for something so stupid. I mean, who's he famous to anyway?"
          "Wait a minute—Jeffrey? He wouldn't happen to work at a trattoria on Stockton Street?"
          "Yeah, how did you—"
          "Wow."
          "No kidding. I guess he is famous for something."
—From Everything Is Its Own Reward: An All Over Coffee Collection, a large collection of meticulous pen and ink cityscapes and thoughts from the weekly San Francisco Chronicle series "All Over Coffee" by Paul Madonna (City Lights Books, 2011). This is his second collection of work from the newspaper. My favorite panels from this book were on pages 75, 82, 103, and 207. The excerpt quoted here is from page 75.