Fiction
Hitchhiker
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A story about danger. « She wondered when he was going to ask her where she was going. »
The original Dybbuk
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A story about afterlife. « A saint! What do you mean he’s a saint! the scholar says. He’s a librarian! Are librarians saints? »
Trouble at work and home while my son is abroad
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A story about living. « I have a family and I have a job and I have a teaching gig, and these things have me. »
Streuselkuchen
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A story about coolness. « The phone rings. It is Jim Jarmusch, and he asks if I want to come over to his place. »
Perhentian Sunrise
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A story about romance. « The eve of a suitor’s arrival, bigger than Christmas or birthday, I tell you. »
A Silence Shared
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« If a story just like that one — dying babies, divine retribution — had come back to me from childhood memories, it would have seemed fantastical, unreal. »
The Ogre, the Monk and the Maiden
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A story about quarks and antiquarks, beauty quarks and strangelets, gluons, muons, prions, hadrons and charms.
An Unlucky Man
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« He rolled down the window, went back to honking the horn, and started waving my underpants out the window. »
A Madman’s Tale
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« I guess it all began, » he said, « because of that weak-headedness my father sometimes had. It just rubbed me the wrong way. »
By misadventure
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A short story about vertigo from the author of Utopia Avenue, Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green. « Possibly a dare, or a rite of passage, hung in the air. Remember their age: most late teenagers are immortal. »
The final frontier
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New short fiction from the author of Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer. A story about what’s ours and what’s not ours.