The Strange Recital

"How's your IPA?" "Not bad." "So...are your classes going okay?" "Well, yes and no. Are you finding that these students think differently than we did? It's like they take everything literally." "No sense of poetry or metaphor, you mean? I see the same thing with the math students. For instance, the idea of imaginary numbers."   Two men talking...but this is no normal conversation. Too many heady i...

"Vera is losing her grip on time. She's been driving all night, for days even, she can't say. She pulls over onto the shoulder of road next to the creek, her wheels rumbling across a muddy lump of plowed snow as she comes to a stop."   To be young forever...is it really what you want? In this excerpt from a new novel, a woman born in the Catskills over two hundred years ago returns to her home, se...

"I don't remember how I heard about the burned girl. Probably it was my new friend Scot, with his spiritual leanings and whom I was seeing a lot of at that time, who told me. A new friend is useful in the kind of crisis that ensues when you are cutting your old life loose, or have had it cut loose for you."    A woman's intimately-told meditation on how empathy for another's suffering may be cruci...

"Affecting lightheartedness, I trod the moist pavements of the narrow streets. As though in tears and veiled, the lamps glimmered through the chill gloom and sucked their reflections slowly from the wet ground. The forgotten years of my youth came back to me. How I used to love the dark, sad evenings of late autumn and winter...."   In this excerpt from a literary classic, a man meditates on his o...

"The month was October, the day brilliant. Bareheaded, bald too young but well-bearded, a man not long past his youth strode along Bleecker, his comfortable shoes belying the business-like focus of his venture. His water-flow way of dodging fellow walkers was well-practiced, a city-dweller's skill used even as he hunted."   Three lives intersect for reasons unknown. One has a strange gift: a poet...

"I saw that Constance had emailed me suggesting we meet. She was embroiled in a mystery and needed my help. She would tell me more in person. We met on a bench in a park. The mystery was complicated. It involved two or more people who appeared to be one..."   A man accompanies his friend to Paris to solve a mystery. But is it really a mystery, or something else? This is a story that challenges the...

"The last time I saw my father I barely saw him. Now that morning seems sharp as shears but I know it wasn't. I was half-asleep. I think I made my way to the kitchen. I think my father was already starting to leave. We may have hugged."   An enigmatic young woman tries to make sense of her life alone in an unnamed city full of demolitions and abandoned buildings. This metaphor-driven new novel fro...

"For three years, we knew Dad had a lump in his throat. He had trouble swallowing, and several times a day, he would be possessed by a mad coughing fit that would leave him clutching the furniture for support."   In this opening from a highly-praised novel, an adult daughter begins to face her father's chronic pain, his impending death. How will she respond to his request for a merciful release?

"The scent of cardamom wafted from Father. Mother wore a liripipe of azure silk that drew out her narrow chin, hazel eyes, and the grey streaks in her hair. I watched Father's gaze dart among the hills. Columns of smoke crept through a windless sky."   In this novel excerpt, a young man feigns madness, trades vision for vision amongst ruffians in a dark tavern, and meets his raven companions. But...

"'Listen to this,' he said. What sounded like a wind chime filled the room, a wind chime on a farmhouse porch, restless in a shifting tempest. I could feel a change in barometric pressure and a subtle increase in humidity as the sound floated on the breeze. The feeling was vast and lonely as though isolated on an American prairie."   A recording engineer explores amazing new techniques. Can we cap...

"The crowd that had gathered on the quay to watch the departure of Shadow Rose held no collective opinion as to whether she would return. Now that the chronology of those events has become so jumbled, it might be said that she never left."   A sailing ship, a sunlit city, a young man's search. This reading, excerpted from a new collection of richly atmospheric short (and very short) stories, sugge...

"In a world of comfort and infinite abundance, Valentina Briggs was sitting quietly, doing nothing, trying to detach... kneeling on the floor, her buttocks resting on her upturned feet, hands forming an oval in her lap, thumbs ever so lightly touching, trying her best to think of not thinking. Thoughts were racing through her mind."   If meditation isn't working, what's a Variant-Positive Normal w...

"The zodiacal light is very faint and so are we, from hunger, a hunger for the stars, the stars we can never reach. Yes, it is faint and so are our hopes, but that doesn't matter if we enjoy the standing and reaching, on the shoulders of our friends, on a ladder, on chairs piled on chairs. We are nearer the stars that way."   Like a few gems in one's palm, here are several very short fictions that...

"For what must have been the hundredth time that long day I studied the second hand of my watch, a heavy blue-faced Bulova that my wife had spent way too much on for our first wedding anniversary. It had outlasted our marriage and was still keeping perfect time, which was no small comfort."   As this novel begins, a divorced, depressed architect is about to embark on a life-changing project. A cru...

"When the bombing started, J.T. Carter was deep in the bowels of a bank in Baltimore with a video camera on his shoulder, capturing,  cinema verité , the mundane fate of everyone's rent check."   Desert Storm, 1991. And more foreign wars to follow. At home, we live our safe American lives full of domestic tedium and drama. Here is one man's story.

"The Floressas Des Esseintes, to judge by the various portraits preserved in the Château de Lourps, had originally been a family of stalwart troopers and stern cavalry men. Closely arrayed, side by side, in the old frames which their broad shoulders filled, they startled one with the fixed gaze of their eyes, their fierce moustaches and the chests whose deep curves filled the enormous shells of th...

"Ibn Zakarya was born in the western mountains of Persia, when silk merchants from the east still plied their trade. Even as a half-naked child playing in a dust, he proved himself a prodigy, scratching the shape of the moon in the yellow earth."   A tale of ancient deserts where the boundary between science and magic is blurred. A young man's genius is not always valued. What exactly is "wisdom"?

"When he was fifteen Fabian saw the film  The 39 Steps , which had just come out. He liked to say that this film was a turning-point in his life. It was an epiphany for him. As he left the cinema he knew that he wanted to make films."   An excerpt from a new novel in which characters invent other characters, and events are both magical and real. What is authorship? Who's in charge here, anyway?  

"More than thirty years ago occurred the first of the series of remarkable events I am about to relate. The exact date I can not recall; but it was in November, and, to those familiar with November weather in the Ohio Valley, it is hardly necessary to state that the month is one of possibilities."   The gloomy beginning of a strange Victorian novel...a man alone in a lamp lit room on a stormy nigh...

"Last night I took the riverside walk for the first time in longer than I care to remember. Nothing much had changed. Homeless men and women were still spending the night on municipal benches. Some were asleep; they breathed noisily, or moaned."   Who is this person who walks in the dark hours? Is his city the same as yours? In all temporal planes, humans carry on with lives both harsh and gentle.

"The first time I saw the animal, I'll admit I was tired. It was late at night and I had been drinking at a moderate pace for several hours. The animal could have been anything, the way it flashed across the room, and I was too slow to get a good look at it." Something has invaded your home. Yes, it's real. Surely you can trust your own perceptions, right? But...is the thing changing?

"The voice asked at Eddie Tomlinson's elbow, 'Is this seat free?' Eddie nodded, and hardly looking around, picked up his hat which he had carelessly put on the seat at his side. Then he went back to his contemplation of the wooded hills through which the train was threading its way." In the 1950's, two men meet on a train...are they strangers or friends? One day, each of their worlds had drastical...

"Everyone just wants to be loved a bit more than everyone else. See me and not my brothers, my sisters, my bandmates. Love me and not my kid. Feel my sadness."   A dead rock star faces his life on a journey home. A lonely fan from the mountains does the same. Paul Smart reads from his novel OVERLOOK, and talks about its origins.

"Lightning flashed, thunder cracked, and the diner was instantly in utter blackness. There was a palpable sensation of absence in the air, a sort of death as all electrical vibration in the city ceased in one instant."   A nighttime commuter encounters a hitchhiker in a New Jersey diner, but it's no ordinary meeting. Who is this odd traveler, and what changes will be wrought by his hypnotic powers...

"Valentine Basilevich Glass, native of Vyborg, accountant in the bureau of administration of the Leningrad Parks of Culture and Rest, led a number of unrelated lives. Whereas most people were trapped by the web of Soviet bureaucracy, he reveled in its complexity and quirkiness, finding in the course of his work numerous loopholes which he impressed in his memory, an unconscious act much like antic...