It was there that the father-son relationship was nurtured by proxy, though increasingly as my brother approached puberty, the attractions became less familial and more like lovers. He would murmur ...
On the night Mrs. Chen got lost, she was wearing a golden amulet of the goddess Kuan Yin underneath her clothes, for protection. She took the subway home from the ...
The man who invented Mah Jong is a hero. Yeah, definitely a hero. He saves people’s lives, people like me who have nothing good to count on at night. You ...
Imagine—if you will—that you are a large bird, hovering over the town of Jujiu on 20 April 1998. You would have seen the county’s deputy mayor, Li Yaojun, getting unexpectedly ...
I love you. These simple words knock against the inside of his head the same way police knock. Hard. Loveless. I love you. He sits in a backward chair by ...
‘Excuse me. Does this train go to Ames?’ Taeko Endo asked a woman reading a newspaper in one of the seats near the door.
‘Yes, it does,’ the woman answered, smiling.
Taeko ...
Cassandra White is not a virtuous widow with her grizzled hair coiled into a bun. She does not wear a series of shapeless outfits in black, and she does not, ...
I am in Cairo. I’m meeting a friend of a friend whom I’ve never seen before. I’m supposed to be her professional sound recordist for a radio documentary ...
It had been one of those whirlwind conference romances. Now the very distinguished and very pretty professor from Irvine and I were deciding whether to attend one more afternoon session, ...
So this is what happened on my school trip.
First off, I have to say, what really did my head in was mom coming along for the ride. They wanted volunteers ...
How Country Club Plaza was able to stay open, nobody really knew. It ranked as one of the central mysteries of the city, along with the hauntings at the California ...
Clive Montague never liked me particularly. I certainly never liked him. Loud, boorish, with floppy fair hair, there was—there is—nothing to like. This gives rise to two questions:
First. Why, some ...
Autumn in Paris; winter in Prague; spring in Amsterdam. It’s summer so here I am. I didn’t know if you would be here but I came anyway. When I fell ...
When I informed my father of my decision to cut down from full- to part-time employment, he was indignant: ‘If you aren’t going to bring home a proper wage, you’d ...
‘I thought I saw…’
She trailed off. The coffee machine gave a loud beep, jetting boiling mud-colour liquid into the cup below the nozzle and Jeanette risked a glance at the ...
I know how the world will end. Deep inside most people do. Despite lectures on strategic equilibrium and all the reassuring propaganda, we all know Eliot was wrong. The world ...
I mean, if I just stop thinking for a second and let the lack of silence wash over me, in what I imagine would be an orangey wave of dust ...
“Sky-blue,” the boy hears, as he sweeps the yard and feels the broom come to a sudden halt. He looks to one side with a start, then behind him, then ...
Since November the temperature had been rising steadily. It had reached more than thirty degrees and nothing, not even the downpours that fell every so often, could reduce the sweltering ...
He started by telling me that it was all interconnected: the colt, the earth, the skirt, the strawberry and so on; because it had all been very well thought out, ...