story: “Man-eating Cats”
author: Haruki Murakami
year: 2006
where: in palestra
note: a reread, a favorite, a fantasy!
a line: “The wind was the wind at the edge of the world. An inescapable retro color filled the place. It made me feel as if I were being quietly swallowed up by an alien reality, something foreign and just out of reach, vague yet strangely gentle. And the shadow of that substance colored the faces, the eyes, the skin of the people gathered in the harbor.”
story: “Commerce and Residue”
author: Tim Fitts
year: 2017 (in Go Home and Cry for Yourselves)
where: mio ufficio
note: a great story for our age of cultural appropriation politics
a line: “Marcus slightly envied the fact that Pham had an automatic angle borne into her. She was part of the diaspora. Her father had spent time in re-education camps.”
story: “Saint Andrew’s Hotel”
author: Sara Majka
year: 2016
where: Greece
note: from Cities I’ve Never Lived In
a line: “Peter stayed in the hospital until he was twenty-one; nobody could find his parents, and the hospital had put him to use in the kitchen.”
story: “The Adventure of a Soldier”
author: Italo Calvino
year: 1984 (English translation)
where: Philadelphia train
note: Such great description of how time stretches in the moments of nearness to someone we desire.
a line: “This meeting of calves was precious, but it came at a price, a loss: in fact, the body’s weight was shifted and the reciprocal support of the hips no longer occurred with the same docile abandon.”
story: “The Lost Order”
author: Rivka Galchen
year: 2014
where: casa dolce casa
note: I can’t recall the stimulus for purchasing Galchen’s book, American Innovations, and this makes me sad. I hate forgetting. This story has a ring like Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing”…a ringing call. The main character also feels like a more morose and confused Lorrie Moore character.
a line: “I have not always–had not even long–been a daylight ghost, a layabout, a mal pensant, a vacancy, a housewife, a person foiled by the challenge of getting dressed and someone who considered eating less a valid primary goal.”
story: “White Rain”
author: Helen McClory
year: 2018
where: outside still, Abu Dhabi
note: another gem from w i g l e a f
a line: “In text she was that way; overeager, pressing. I had withdrawn. She pushed back, then lashed out. Then a spattering of texts and incidental photographs that were obviously sent out in a kind of bruised friendship.”
story: “Now That the Circus Has Shut Down, the Human Cannonball Looks for Work”
author: Meghan Phillips
year: 2018
where: 我的办公室 (again)
note: This short short story has the punch at the end like contemporary English poetry. Maybe it has something to do with its length too; though it would not be mistaken for a prose poem.
a line: “He’s happy to be a reference, but he’s not sure how much weight the words of a clown will carry.”
