The Strange Recital

"Morning came like any other. Alphonse was awake, uncertain if he had slept. He could hear the lonely song of a bird as the sky filled with gloomy light and the few remaining splintered trees were revealed, beautiful as the skeletons of ghosts."   Two men whose fates are entangled in someone's story, but whose? What events lead us to where we are now, and to the self we have become?  

"As the applause that had accompanied the hero to the podium began to fade, he lifted a hand to stop it. 'When you're making up your narrative as you go,' he began humbly, 'you may develop whole sections of action and dialog for one purpose, only to change your mind later on...'"   Two very short stories... do they share a common theme? Where do stories come from, anyway? Can creativity be acciden...

"Henry mashed his cigarette into a tinfoil ashtray. It was full of tar-stinking butts. He crumpled the ashtray closed and, squirming against the passenger door, stuffed the smoldering lump into his jeans like a carcinogenic pocket warmer." Three guys drive into the mountains. Then they dig a hole. Why would a young man flirt with death? Where will it lead?

"The trouble started when he went for a walk. Or perhaps it had started earlier with the cup of coffee he drank just before going out. It wasn't so much the coffee as the milk, but that had not seemed important at the time."   A chilly walk in the woods... an unusual stranger... has something gone wrong with time, or is it always like this?

"Howling and half-naked in his torn and bloody clothing Fargo is a desperate man and dangerous to himself and others. He ricochets around his kitchen, heaving furniture into the street."   What does a man do when he reaches the very limit of himself? Can there ever be a way back? New York City or the world, livin' ain't easy.

"Isobel Harper wakes to the dream. The images come back in her waking hours like still frames of cinema noir, the camera shots collapsing and superimposing upon each other: A girl's silent scream caught in the glare of a street light. A man's fist poised at a door."   A child's mind captures snapshots of trauma. What are the long-term effects? Does memory turn our lives into movies?

"I'm dreaming, was my first thought. My body had risen weightless into the air, helped by the movements I'd made, like swimming; the cold night air blew chill on my cheeks and ruffled my hair." Is it a story about poverty and brutality, or about magic and wonder? Wartime Athens gets a unique treatment in this excellent translation from Greek.

"When Arnie Beers woke one morning to find a sign planted on his front lawn, he was amused.  He chuckled as he pulled the sign's flimsy posts out of the ground and held it up for his wife to see from the picture window."   Sometimes, unknown beings do inexplicable things. Who? Why? What happens inside yourself when you have no answers?

"Chopped into triangles by the superstructure of the bridge, the sun strobed as he accelerated across the span. On and off the sun flashed; the sunlight splintered and exploded."   If you're driving with eyes closed, steered by a psychic, what's your story? Will love last? We may never know.

"Whenever I arrive, it's the wrong time. No one has to tell me. The right time is a few minutes earlier or later. Invariably I arrive at the wrong time in the wrong place. Wherever I am, it is the wrong place."   Whose voice is speaking? Is it yours? Mine? In the real world, can anything ever be just right? 

"From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind."   What is wrong with the people of Pikeville? Ed might be the only one who's alarmed. Should he speak up or stay quiet?

"Sophia parted the curtains of maroon velour and ducked into the room... She was greeted on the other side by Françoise, whose stout hand proffered a glass of hot tea... It was brewed from a blend of black leaves and mushrooms, picked under the light of the full moon by Françoise's gnarled fingers, somewhere outside Paris, or so it was said."   A young woman takes a life-changing journey. Where is...

"In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. Somebody is living in the Louvre, certain of the messages would say. Or in the National Gallery. Naturally they could only say that when I was in Paris or in London."   A woman's lone voice speaks to us from a house on a remote beach. Is she mad, or is she really the only person left on earth?

"The world's greatest magician did not like Cherbourg, and he did not like waiting. Huddled beneath his woolen overcoat, Perjos stared at the gray English Channel awaiting the blast that would announce the first boarding call for the  S.S. Rotterdam ." It's 1922, the era of Houdini and Conan Doyle. Where are the boundaries between mind, body, and spirit? Sample a novel that asks "What is magic?"

"Luck has bad breath. That's what the Schwartzbear said, before they carried him out feet first. Billy was still on his feet the day he got out. He'd done hard time and more solitary than most and had no luck."   Prison life is cruel. Then you're out on the hard streets of the city. What's next? Can you let friendship change your world?

"I could see Dubček up there on the stage, lolling back in his chair, his cello leaning against one knee. It was not the posture one would expect from a professional musician. His cello gleamed white in the stage lights. Suddenly there was a shout from somewhere in the audience. 'Rubbish!'"   Two witnesses to a wild melee at an odd orchestral performance tell their stories. What is the provenance...

"I watched pensive Johnathan push his shopping cart slowly. He was making his usual rounds past the corner where crack falls from the sky like snow." A glimpse into an upside-down reality right here on our streets, co-existing in parallel with our cozy lives. Who bridges the gap?

"Men see what they need to in times of war. But what men claimed to have seen during the Great War defied imagination."   That's just the beginning of a strange journey into magic and history in the mysterious, old-time Catskills. Do dark fairies haunt our woods?

"I spent the final decade of the twentieth century wandering. Tolkein whispered in my ear: 'Not all who wander are lost.' Ha. Some are."   A hitchhiker encounters something inexplicable in an average American town. What makes an artist? Can something be both real and impossible?

"Do I mythologize Lincoln? Certainly. But he was mythic. Abraham led the nation into a vast fratricidal war—a Greek myth multiplied by 500,000. He spent most of his Presidency wondering why the gods had cursed him, like Oedipus." A chiropractor thinking about a President... why not? Past and present mingle in a man's journal. Is this a novel or something else?

"Outside in the street, it was cold and damp. The fine wind-driven rain needled her exposed flesh. It was a foul day but it didn't bother her, as she was alive with inspiration...." Art and dreams in surrealist Paris. Journeying to the deep interior can be dangerous. Will she return?

"As you drive northeast through Dutchess County in upstate New York, farm scenes strike calendar poses: leaning barns, well-tended white Victorians, winding roads tunneling through overhanging maples." A pastoral paradise... but is there something dark under the surface? Troubles in America manifest in the personal. Let Hamlet tell you about it.  

"I hope you've not taken cold with the doors open, Doctor. The wind was blowing harsh on the heath. I'd forgotten how mortally cold wind can make you."   A riveting dialogue between the dying Sigmund Freud and a blind prophet from ancient Greece, a key player in the drama of Oedipus. What happened, and what does it mean?

"It was Christmas '37 when the ship docked at Piraeus and disgorged me and my trunk onto the quay of the commercial harbor.... I was now just like the immigrants you'd sometimes see on Ellis Island, back in my own country."   An injured detective flees New York to land in Athens at the dawn of war. He'll face desolation, oppression, music, magic.... Sample the first English translation of an accla...

"In some old magazine or newspaper, I recollect a story, told as truth, of a man—let us call him Wakefield—who absented himself for a long time from his wife."   An odd little character piece about the inexplicability of human behavior... was this long-dead author ahead of his time?