Short stories and poems from The New Yorker.
Updated: 35 weeks 5 days ago
Mon, 05/30/2011 - 04:00
My stepfather wasn’t a big man, not much taller than my mother. He was lithe and light on his feet, handsome, with velvety dark brows, a sensual mouth, and jet-black hair in a crewcut as thick and soft as the pelt of an animal (not that I . . . (Subscription required.)
Mon, 05/30/2011 - 04:00
I stop a tall girl all in blue on the hall
and receive first a harried and desultory apology
then, point blank, news that you passed late last night.
You passed at three-thirty in the morning.
What is it, some sort of exam?
She smiles at herself,
epicenter of . . . (Subscription required.)
Mon, 05/30/2011 - 04:00
The boy in the Egyptian wing
Wanted one thing:
For his father
To lift him over
The glass case
Where the Sarcophagus
For a century
Lay empty,
The bones and treasures
Sold to collectors,
And to pretend
Again and again
To lower him in . . . (Subscription required.)
Mon, 05/23/2011 - 04:00
A war’s going on somewhere, but tonight
a forest glows beneath the big top,
calling for the sword-swallower & contortionist,
the beautiful high-wire walker who almost dies
nightly, the fire-eater, the lion-tamer, the believer
in sage & sleeping salts who wears a money belt . . . (Subscription required.)
Mon, 05/23/2011 - 04:00
Ginny had promised to take the girls to M&M World, that ridiculous place in Times Square they had passed too often in a taxi, Maggie scooting to press her face to the glass to watch the giant smiling M&M scale the Empire State Building on the . . .
Mon, 05/23/2011 - 04:00
A meditation on the question “Was it all worth it”
his memoir recounts his
finding himself suddenly “coming to”
as if from a coma
in the middle of a banquet
and the recognition
that age had advanced on him glacially.
Then the gash down the plane . . . (Subscription required.)
Mon, 05/16/2011 - 04:00
They had been moving up the road a week without seeing another farmhouse, and the nearest well, at least the nearest the owner would let Sinkler use, was half a mile back. What had been a trusty sluff job was now as onerous as swinging a kaiser blade or shovelling . . . (Subscription required.)
Mon, 05/16/2011 - 04:00
First came Bob (Just Bob), a visiting cousin’s
second husband, the operator
of Lyndon Johnson’s teleprompter;
then Archie Persons, Truman Capote’s
biological father,
jitterbugging in the parlor
at my eighth-grade English teacher’s Christmas party.
Then more flagrant examples:
chance sightings of . . . (Subscription required.)
Mon, 05/16/2011 - 04:00
In daylight, I turned on the lights,
in darkness, I pulled closed the curtains.
And the god of More,
whom nothing surprises, softly agreed—
each day, year after year,
the dead were dead one day more completely.
In the places where morels were found,
I looked for morels.
In . . . (Subscription required.)
Mon, 05/09/2011 - 04:00
Going too fast for myself I missed
more than I think I can remember
almost everything it seems sometimes
and yet there are chances that come back
that I did not notice when they stood
where I could have reached out and touched them
this morning the black shepherd dog . . . (Subscription required.)
Mon, 05/09/2011 - 04:00
are from Montenegro. Also
tall women wearing four-inch
spiked heels. No, I don’t want
to be a tall woman or a tall
man. Too much bending.
Better a student of reaching.
But ahh—glimpsing the willow
revises me completely . . . (Subscription required.)
Mon, 05/09/2011 - 04:00
Welcome to the endless high-school
Reunion. Welcome to past friends
And lovers, however kind or cruel.
Let’s undervalue and unmend
The present. Why can’t we pretend
Every stage of life is the same?
Let’s exhume, resume, and extend
Childhood. Let’s all . . . (Subscription required.)
Mon, 05/09/2011 - 04:00
He wasn’t talking. He was looking out the window of the car all the way. The two adults in the front seat spoke quietly under their breath. He could have listened if he wanted to but he didn’t. For a while, at the section of the . . . (Subscription required.)
Mon, 05/02/2011 - 04:00
I travelled to a level land
Past sleeping towns with names of sand:
Now they are gone.
The polders from the marshes won,
The houses made of brick, not stone:
Raise no alarm.
The linseed mill with icy arms,
The whitewashed churches purged of charms
Evade our look.
The beeches . . . (Subscription required.)
Mon, 05/02/2011 - 04:00
When he felt good, or even vaguely a little bit good, and sometimes even when he was not, by psychiatric standards, well at all, but nonetheless had a notion that he might soon be coming out of the Dread, as he called it, he insisted on taking Alice to Bergdorf . . . (Subscription required.)
Mon, 05/02/2011 - 04:00
From the notebooks of Bruce Chatwin)
1.
I am not too thrilled with Turkey.
Today it has occurred
to me what is missing—
a sense of the absurd.
Stung by a wasp in the lorry.
(August 29, 1967)
2.
Good subject for a story—
the young camionero crushed . . . (Subscription required.)
Mon, 04/25/2011 - 04:00
8220;Trauma this, atrocity that, people ought to keep their traps shut,” Mandy’s father said. American traps tended to hang open. Pure crap poured out. What he and the others had gone through shouldn’t have a name, he told her friend Tovah, all those years . . .
Mon, 04/25/2011 - 04:00
Your smile makes me think of Larry in “The Razor’s Edge.”
Your voice is George singing “Got me escapin’ from this zoo.”
Your eyes are a sculpture by Jesús Rafael Soto.
Your body reminds me of the boy who resembled a . . . (Subscription required.)
Mon, 04/25/2011 - 04:00
They were in the air on chairs,
the bride and groom, when of course
they needed a table so we lifted
a table, a dishwasher
and our shoulders were strong enough,
a sofa and I began to understand
the demands of Judaism
when we let go and they stayed, decades . . . (Subscription required.)
Mon, 04/25/2011 - 04:00
And the lovely Garonne, which passes
through drowsy villages each night
like a priest with the last sacrament.
Dark clouds grow in the sky.
The Visigoths live on, in certain faces.
In summer the empire of insects spreads.
You consider how not to be yourself:
is it only on journeys . . . (Subscription required.)
