Poetry by Tadeusz Dąbrowski and Kirmen Uribe, fiction by Hye-Young Pyun, and nonfiction by Meghan Daum and Caroline Knapp

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It's as if you'd woken in a locked cell and found

in your pocket a slip of paper, and on it a single sentence

in a language you don't know.

—From "Sentence," a poem by Tadeusz Dąbrowski, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The New Yorker (July 22, 2019), p. 60. 

Our grandmother worked at the cannery.

And our mother and aunts.

They were workers, not housewives.

Or were that, too.

—From "Back from the Cannery," a poem by Kirmen Uribe, translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin, The New Yorker (November 23, 2020), p. 60-61. 

The same thing for lunch every day. Every day he ate the same thing, the Set A menu from the cafeteria in the School of Liberal Arts. And the Set A menu was always the same. It included rice, soup, kimchi and three side dishes. The three side dishes did consist of of something different each day, but the overall menu was so similar from one day to the next that by the time he was on his way home, he could barely remember what side dishes he'd eaten.  
—From Evening Proposal, a collection of short stories by Pyun Hye Young (whose name is now usually listed in English as Hye-Young Pyun), translated from the Korean by Youngsuk Park and Gloria Cosgrove Smith (Dalkey Archive Press, 2016). Originally published in Korean by Moonji Publishing Company, 2011. This particular segment is from "Monotonous Lunch" (pp. 49-61).

People who weren't there like to say that my mother died at home surrounded by loving family. This is technically true, though it was just my brother and me and he was looking at Facebook and I was reading a profile of Hillary Clinton in the December 2009 issue of Vogue.  

—From The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, a collection of essays by Meghan Daum (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).  This section is from the first essay, "Matricide."

When you love somebody, or something, it's amazing how willing you are to overlook the flaws. Around that same time, in my thirties, I started to notice that tiny blood vessels had burst all along my nose and cheeks. I started to dry-heave in the mornings, driving to work in my car. A tremor in my hands developed, then grew worse, then persisted for longer periods, all day sometimes.  

        I did my best to ignore all this. I struggled to ignore it, the way a woman hears a coldness in a lover's voice and struggles, mightily and knowingly, to misread it.  

—From Drinking: A Love Story, a memoir by Caroline Knapp (Dial Press/Bantam Dell/Random House, 1996).  

Fiction by Paul La Farge, Jean Thompson, and Diane Cook; a poem by Jin Cordaro; and the new book by Allie Brosh

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She also has an extensive library of self-help books, which implies that, for all her intelligence and self-possession, Dara may have some problems.  She is for sure a recovering alcoholic; one of the first things she told April P was that she doesn't allow drinking or drugs in her house.  Also, and she did not warn April P about this, Dara is a toucher.  She keeps finding reasons to squeeze April P's arm, pat her hand, give her a mini shoulder rub.  

--From "Rosendale," a short story by Paul La Farge, The New Yorker (September 29, 2014), pp. 72-77. 

He came back.  I saw him

in the grass, the white of him

glowing in the floodlight, . . .

--From "After We Buried the Dog in the Dark," a poem by Jin Cordaro, The Sun (December 2020).

My grandma usually supervised me while my parents were at work.  She'd drink screwdrivers and do the crossword, I'd run around the house and do whatever.  If she hadn't seen me in a while, she'd check to make sure I still had all my fingers, but escaping wasn't a big concern.  The doors were locked.  Just in case, there were jingle bells on the handles.

        The dog door was the single weak point in the fortress.  

--From Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh (Gallery Books, 2020).  It's essentially a sequel to her earlier book, Hyperbole and a Half.  (I referred to that one as a "tragicomic illustrated memoir," which seems about right for this one as well.)  The section above is from page 20 of the hardcover.

The bride and groom had two wedding receptions: the first was in the basement of the Lutheran church right after the ceremony, with punch and cake and coffee and pastel mints.  This was for those of the bride's relatives who were stern about alcohol.  The basement was low-ceilinged and smelled of metallic furnace heat.  Old ladies wearing corsages sat on folding chairs, while other guests stood and managed their cake plates and plastic forks as best they could.  The pastor smiled with professional benevolence.  The bride and groom posed for pictures, buoyed by adrenaline and relief.  There had been so much promised and prepared, and now everything had finally come to pass.    

--From The Year We Left Home, a novel by Jean Thompson (Simon & Schuster, 2011). 

They let me tend to my husband's burial and settle his affairs, which means that for a few days I get to stay in my house, pretend he is away on business while I stand in the closet and smell his clothes.  I cook dinners for two and throw the rest away, or overeat, depending on my mood.  I make a time capsule of pictures I won't be allowed to keep.  I bury it in the yard for a new family to discover.

        But once that work is done, the Placement Team orders me to pack two bags of essentials, good for any climate.  They take the keys to our house, our car.  A crew will come in, price it all, and a sale will be advertised; all the neighbors will come.  I won't be here for any of this, but I've seen it happen to others.  The money will go into my dowry, and then someday, hopefully, another man will marry me.

--From Man V. Nature, a short story collection by Diane Cook (HarperCollins, 2014).  This section is from the first story, "Moving On," which was originally published in Tin House. 

Fiction by Sigrid Nunez, Valérie Perrin, Danielle McLaughlin, and Ben Lerner, and a poem by Lisa Allen Ortiz

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I went to hear a man give a talk.  The event was held on a college campus.  The man was a professor, but he taught at a different school, in another part of the country.  He was a well-known author, who, earlier that year, had won an international prize.  But although the event was free and open to the public, the auditorium was only half full.  I myself would not have been in the audience, I would not even have been in that town, had it not been for a coincidence.  A friend of mine was being treated in a local hospital that specializes in treating her particular type of cancer.  I had come to visit this friend, this very dear old friend whom I had not seen in several years, and whom, given the gravity of her illness, I might not see again.  

        It was the third week of September, 2017.  I had booked a room through Airbnb.  The host was a retired librarian, a widow. . . .

        A cat had been promised, but I saw no sign of one.  Only later, when it was time for me to leave, would I learn that, between my booking and my stay, the host's cat had died.  She delivered this news brusquely, immediately changing the subject so that I couldn't ask her about it--which I was in fact going to do only because something in her manner made me think that she wanted to be asked about it.  And it occurred to me that maybe it wasn't emotion that had made her change the subject like that but rather worry that I might later complain.  Depressing host talked too much about dead cat.  The sort of comment you saw on the site all the time.  

--From What Are You Going Through, a novel by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead Books, 2020).  Nunez's previous book, The Friend, was a New York Times bestseller and the winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction.  

We arrived at the Brancion-en-Chalon cemetery on August 15th, 1997.  France was on holiday.  All the locals had taken off.  The birds that fly from grave to grave weren't flying anymore.  The cats that stretch out between the potted plants had disappeared.  It was even too warm for the ants and lizards; all the marble was burning hot.  The gravediggers had the day off, as did the newly deceased.  I wandered alone around the paths, reading the names of people I would never know.  And yet I immediately felt good there.  Where I belonged.  
--From Fresh Water for Flowers, a novel by Valérie Perrin, translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle (Europa Editions, 2020).  Originally published in French as Changer l'eau des fleurs (Editions Albin Michel: Paris, France, 2018).  This segment is from page 17 in the hardcover version.   

From the ditch behind the house, Kate could see her husband up at the old forestry hut, where mottled scrubland gave way to dense lines of trees.  "Colman!" she called, but he didn’t hear.  She watched him swing the axe in a clean arc and thought that from this distance he could be any age.  Lately, she’d found herself wondering what he'd been like as a very young man, a man of twenty. She hadn't known him then.  He had already turned forty when they met.

        It was early April, the fields and ditches coming green again after winter.  Grass verges crept outward, thickening the arteries of narrow lanes.  "There's nothing wrong," she shouted when she was still some yards off.  He was in his shirtsleeves, his coat discarded on the grass beside him.  "Emer rang from London.  She's coming home."
        He put down the axe.  "Home for a visit, or home for good?"  He had dismantled the front of the hut and one of the side walls.  On the floor inside, if floor was the word, she saw empty beer cans, blankets, a ball of blackened tinfoil.

--From "The Dinosaurs on Other Planets," a short story by Danielle McLaughlin, The New Yorker (September 15, 2014), pp. 80-87.  

The year before, they'd found cavities in the author's wisdom teeth; they needed to come out.  He could elect I.V. sedation ("twilight sedation") or just local anesthetic, as the dentist suggested.  They'd taken a panoramic X-ray of his head, chin on a little stand while a camera whirred and clicked around him, and then scheduled the extractions for the following month, when the dentist was back from vacation.  There was no rush.  It would be a few days of unpleasantness, that's all.  Let the office know twenty-four hours in advance if you want the I.V., said the receptionist, whose fingernails were painted with stars.
        He learned from the Internet that the difference between twilight sedation and local anesthesia was not primarily a difference in the amount of pain but in the memory of it.  The benzodiazepines calm you during the procedure, yes, but their main function is to erase your memory of whatever transpires: the dentist getting leverage, cracking, a sudden jet of blood.  This helped explain why the people he asked were fuzzy regarding the details of their own extractions, often unsure if they'd been sedated or not.
        That October his ruminations about twilight sedation dominated his walks with Liza.  They would meet at Grand Army Plaza in the late afternoon and head into the Long Meadow of Prospect Park, then wander along the smaller trails as the light died in the trees.  Finally, it was the last walk before he had to call if he wanted the I.V.

--From "The Golden Vanity," a short story by Ben Lerner, The New Yorker (June 18, 2012), pp. 66-73.

Do bees breathe?

I don't want to look it up.  

I just want to believe 

that you are a bee

and I am the poppy you rest in. 

--From "Exaltation," a poem by Lisa Allen Ortiz, Broadsided Press (August 1, 2019).  

The Fall 2020 issue of the Apple Valley Review

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The Fall 2020 issue of the Apple Valley Review features short fiction by Kevin Bray, Morgan Cross, Adam Luebke, Tove Ditlevsen (translated from the Danish by Michael Goldman), and Epiphany Ferrell; an essay by Samantha Steiner; prose poetry by Tiffany Hsieh; poetry by Liana Sakelliou (translated from the Greek by Don Schofield), DS Maolalai, Emily Hyland, Antonio Machado (translated from the Spanish by Thomas Feeny), and Joseph Zaccardi; and a cover painting by Russian artist Konstantin Somov.

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 from Donatella Di Pietrantonio, Margriet de Moor, Josip Novakovich, and Laura van den Berg

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The woman who had conceived me didn't get up from the chair.  The child she held in her arms was sucking his thumb on one side of his mouth--maybe a tooth was coming in.  Both of them looked at me, and he stopped his monotonous crying.  I didn't know I had such a little brother.

        "You're here," she said.  "Put down your things."

        I lowered my eyes to the smell of shoes that wafted from the bag if I moved it even slightly.  From behind the closed door of the room at the back came a tense, sonorous snoring.  The baby started whining again and turned to the breast, dripping saliva on the sweaty, faded cotton flowers.  

        "Why don't you close the door?" the mother curtly asked the girl, who hadn't moved.
--From A Girl Returned, a novel by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2019).  Originally published in Italian as L'Arminuta (Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a.: Torino, Italy, 2017).   

I am grateful to my husband for this soft wooden floor, laid with his own two hands.  I know that he salvaged these planks of oak from a scrapyard.  I even know that the wood originally came from the Heide Hotel, an old hunting lodge.  I walk a floor for which a tidy sum was once paid.  As he worked away in the living room--I can still hear the short, intense blasts of hammering--I was running an angled paintbrush along the frame of the door that leads down to the cellar.  I remember how pleased I was with the color, a grayish green that even now, almost fifteen years later, still seems just right.  I recall the stiffness in my fingers when the paint that had dripped down the side of the brush began to dry.  I didn't have much space to work in.  I see very clearly that the sweep of my clumsy efforts was hemmed in by a pile of secondhand chairs and boxes crammed with wedding gifts.  While the Chinese bowls, the tablecloth embroidered with irises, the cocktail shaker, and goodness knows what else are items I still possess and see almost every day, Ton, my young husband, has vanished without a trace.

--From Sleepless Night, a novel by Margriet de Moor, translated from the Dutch by David Doherty (New Vessel Press, 2019).  First published in Dutch as Slapeloze nacht (De Bezige Bij: Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2016).

Ivan Medvedich was washing his silvery mustache after eating a slice of dark bread with honey when a whistle cut through the air, deepened in frequency, and sank into an explosion that shook the house so that a bar of soap slid from the mirror ledge into the sink.

        "Lord have mercy!" his wife Estera said.  "What was that?"

        "The Chetniks, what else."

        Soon, another whistle and another explosion.

        "Run for cover!" Estera shouted.

        "What cover?  This is the safest place in the house."

        Ivan had built the house alone--actually, with a little help from his oldest, flat-footed son, Daniel, who had groaned more than he worked.  It took Ivan twenty years of careful labor to finish the house, but one thing he had skipped: a cellar, perhaps because snakes had nested and floods crept into the cellar of his childhood home.  God is my fortress and my strength was his motto.  But now, in addition to God, a cellar would help.

--From Honey in the Carcase, a collection of short stories by Josip Novakovich (Dzanc Books, 2019).  This section is the beginning of the title story, "Honey in the Carcase," which was first published in The Threepenny Review (Autumn 1993).  This story was later included in The Pushcart Prize XIX (1994-1995) and reprinted in The Literary Review in 2019 as a TLR Share.   

Eventually I come upon a twenty-four-hour diner called Helen's Kitchen.  The door chimes as I enter.  The diner is empty except for two waitresses, standing behind the counter like strange twins, one on the left-hand side, the other on the right.  They are both wearing forest-green aprons and holding white coffee carafes.  They are wearing the same glasses, with pink cat-eye frames; their hair is pulled back into matching French braids.  For a moment, I think Beth Butler's husband has murdered me after all and Helen's Kitchen is the afterlife.  The woman on the left puts down her carafe.  She walks over and rips the the tape from my mouth.

        "How can we help you?" she says. 

--From I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, a collection of short stories by Laura van den Berg (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020).  This section is from "Your Second Wife" (pages 159-173 in the hardcover).  A slightly different version of this story was published in Lenny Letter (August 28, 2018).    

Fiction by Hye-Young Pyun, Lena Andersson, and Tove Jansson

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Danger warnings are more common than actual danger.  And yet when danger finally does strike, it does so without warning.  That was why the man thought nothing of the quarantine notices and infectious disease prevention regulations posted all around the airport.  He knew that the more caution signs there were, the less danger he was in.  As if overhearing the man's thoughts, a health inspector in a hazmat suit who was scanning the temperatures of disembarking passengers looked hard at the thermometer and gave him a warning frown.  Was it the man's slight fever?  The stink of alcohol wafting off of him?  He clamped his mouth shut and slipped a hand up to his forehead.  It felt like the lid of a rice cooker set to warm.
--From City of Ash and Red, a novel by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (Arcade Publishing, 2018). Originally published in Korean as Jaewa Ppalgang (Changbi Publishers: South Korea, 2010).  Please note: this book contains some specific violence that may not be for everyone. 

Traffic was at a standstill, the cars blocked by a crowd of pedestrians in the middle of the street.  Their voices were nearly loud enough to drown out the blaring of horns.  What had happened?  She could feel everyone's eyes on her.  Could sense them stopping mid-sentence to stare at her.  Stepping back to open a path before she could get too close.  Turning their heads when her eyes met theirs.  Whispering to the people next to them.

        Of course, if she'd actually found the courage to lift her head and look, she would have seen that the others barely registered her presence, but she couldn't manage it.  Se-oh let her head drop further and further.  Any moment now someone was going to recognize her and grab her by the throat or curse at her and demand to know where she'd been hiding.  She hurried away from them.  

--From The Law of Lines, a novel by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (Arcade Publishing, 2020).  Originally published in Korean as Seonui beopchik (Muhakdongne Publishing Group: South Korea).

Every other weekend, Hugo went away.  He said he was going to Borås, where his frail mother lived, but there was something about these trips to Borås that did not quite add up.  There was an unusual vacuum around them, the way unusual vacuums usually surround lies.  The baffling thing was that there was no reason to doubt that the trips were genuine, in the same way that there was no reason he should name a place where he was not going.  But there was still something not quite right.  

        On one of the evenings when they met over food and wine and then went back to his studio, [Ester] saw a train ticket sticking out of the inside pocket of his jacket, which was hanging on the back of a chair.  When he went to the toilet she got up and walked round the room, looked at the art works on the walls and gave the ticket a slight tweak, so light that it hardly counted as an act.

        The ticket was from the previous weekend.  Stockholm-Malmö return, it said.  Not a hint of Borås.

--From Willful Disregard, a novel by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death (Other Press, 2016).  First published in the United Kingdom by Picador (2015).  Originally published in Swedish as Egenmäktigt förfarande – en roman om kärlek (Natur & Kultur: Stockholm, Sweden, 2013).  This segment is from page 38 in the paperback. 

In the past few months at home in Stockholm, she'd written her first play, which was to be performed the coming autumn at a country theater in Västerås.  The play would send her life in a new direction, but of this she knew nothing yet.  The production was called Threesome and was a melancholy reflection on the agonies of love.  Ester Nilsson had striven for psychological realism, and that's exactly what she thought she'd achieved, but the critics would call it absurdist.

        ...

        Threesome was about a man trapped in an unhappy marriage who meets another woman but can't bring himself to leave his wife.  The play was not prophetic.  Nothing is prophetic.  What may look like a prediction is really just a heightened awareness of what has previously come to pass.  What has happened will happen again sooner or later, somewhere, sometime.  And it's likely that it will happen again to the same person because people have their patterns.  

--From Acts of Infidelity, a novel by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel (Other Press, 2018).  First published in English in the United Kingdom by Macmillan Publishers International Limited (2018).  Originally published in Swedish as Utan personligt ansvar (Natur & Kultur: Stockholm, Sweden, 2014).  These segments are from pages 3-5 in the paperback.  

On a windless day in November, shortly after sunrise, she saw a squirrel on the boat beach.  It sat motionless near the water, hardly visible in the half-light, but she knew it was a living squirrel, and she hadn't seen anything alive for a very long time.  The gulls didn't count, they were always flying away.  They were like the wind across the waves and the grass. 

--From "The Squirrel," a short story Tove Jansson.  This story (pp. 38-55) and "The Summer Child" (pp. 150-165) were included in The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella (New York Review Books, 2014). The stories were first published in Swedish by Schildts Förlags AB (Finland).  English translations first appeared in several books (Sort of Books: London, 2006-2013).

Books by Tove Jansson, Ernest Hemingway, Ayşegül Savaş, Dai Sijie, and Yiyun Li

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"When are you going to die?" the child asked.
        And Grandmother answered, "Soon.  But that is not the least concern of yours."
        "Why?" her grandchild asked.
        She didn't answer.  She walked out on the rock and on toward the ravine.
        "We're not allowed out there!" Sophia screamed.
        "I know," the old woman answered disdainfully.  "Your father won't let either one of us go out to the ravine, but we're going anyway, because your father is asleep and he won't know."
        They walked across the granite.  The moss was slippery.  The sun had come up a good way now, and everything was steaming.  The whole island was covered with a bright haze.  It was very pretty.
        "Will they dig a hole?" asked the child amiably.
        "Yes," she said.  "A big hole."  And she added, insidiously, "Big enough for all of us."
--From The Summer Book, a novel by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal (New York Review Books, 2008).  First published in Swedish as Sommarboken (Schildts Förlags AB: Finland, 1972).

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.
        Now that the bad weather had come, we could leave Paris for a while for a place where this rain would be snow coming down through the pines and covering the road and the high hillsides and at an altitude where we would hear it creak as we walked home at night.  Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.  That was where we could go.  Traveling third class on the train was not expensive.  The pension cost very little more than we spent in Paris.
--From A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway's memoir of his life as a young writer in Paris between 1921 and 1926.  He finished the book in 1960 in Cuba.  I was reading the Vintage Classics version (Random House: London, 2000).  It was first published posthumously in Great Britain (Jonathan Cape: London, 1964).  As I understand the story, his fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, edited his manuscripts and notes after his death to create that particular version of the book.  There is also a "restored edition," which contains additional stories left out of the original published book (Scribner, 2009).

I met M. some months after I moved to Paris from Istanbul.  I arrived in the city without a job or a place to live.  I was enrolled in a literature program in order to obtain a visa, but I knew even before I came that I would not attend any of the classes.
        I had enrolled in the same program once before, a few years after I graduated from university in England.  I had a different vision of myself then, and I worked steadily to achieve it.  I was living in London with my boyfriend, Luke, and putting together my life piece by piece.  I imagined that Luke and I would move to Paris, become its natives, and lead the kind of creative life attributed to the residents of the city.  We even spoke to each other in French while we cooked dinner, in preparation for our new life.  
--From Walking on the Ceiling, a novel by Ayşegül Savaş (Riverhead Books, 2019). 

In 1971 there was little to distinguish us two--one the son of a pulmonary specialist, the other the son of a notorious class enemy who had enjoyed the privilege of touching Mao's teeth--from the hundred-odd "young intellectuals" who were banished to the mountain known as as the Phoenix of the Sky.  The name was a poetic way of suggesting its terrifying altitude . . .
        The Phoenix of the Sky comprised some twenty villages scattered along the single serpentine footpath or hidden in the depths of gloomy valleys.  Usually each village took in five or six young people from the city.  But our village, perched on the summit and the poorest of them all, could only afford two: Luo and me.
--From Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, a novel by Dai Sijie, translated from the French by Ina Rilke (Anchor Books/Random House, 2001).  Originally published in France as Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise (Gallimard: Paris, 2000).

Love is made not to last, I said.  A contestable statement, though he chose not to argue.  Love was the word we had used at his leave-taking, he knowing it was final, I sensing it was the case.  But between sensing and knowing there were seven hours and four states.  Only today did I register that people often in their condolence letters called the loss unfathomable.  The distance at the moment of loss could be calculated: 189,200 fathoms.  (What does it matter that fathom is no longer used to measure from here to there?  To obsolete is to let age, from which death is exempted.)
        Not clear, though, is how to fathom time: from a moment to . . .  Can forever be the other end point?
        But why does it bother you if you insist time does not apply to us anymore? Nikolai said.
--From Where Reasons End, a novel by Yiyun Li (Random House, 2019).  The book is a series of imagined conversations between a mother and her sixteen-year-old son in a suspended, timeless state following his death by suicide.  Li wrote the book after the death of her own teenage son.  It's an unusual, affecting meditation on life, death, and the limitations of language.