On Saturday, Mark ate breakfast with me before heading to work, even lingering in deference to the weekend. A month earlier, I’d fled our apartment for two nights to call attention to my despair, but exactly nothing had changed. I wondered if our small life could be enough.
Continue reading “Breathing Underwater by Katrina Irene Gould”
A neighbour two down from us was the only person we directly knew who lost someone. A family member that is. Even though just a distant cousin of theirs, it tore their family apart. Just like it did many families, and how it changed the whole fabric of how we live. Looking back on it now you wouldn’t think such an innocuous job could matter so much, that it could change everything about how we live, but it did. Of course, the tragedy of so many going like that is the main thing, the sheer lack of explanation to this day and how we do things now is borderline unfathomable. Most of all though, I think about our neighbour’s second cousin, just one of thousands, an estimated sixteen thousand, but knowing someone who knew one of them, who left us on that day, just makes it so close.
Continue reading “The Trolley Workers by Paul Kimm”
Frederic was learning how to live in the nothing. The world was tactile, it was the thudding of bare feet on hardwood floors and the sprinkle of misty rain on skin, and it was olfactory, chicken cooking on the stove, peonies, paint thinner. The sounds of his parents murmuring at night and his own name in the news on TV were muffled and far away. There was pain still in his eyes and head, pain that ebbed and flowed, but in his pain-free moments Frederic was the happiest he had been in years.
Continue reading “Hands, Eyes, Feet by Annabel Smith”
Lucian didn’t want to comply.
He didn’t want to climb off his horse. Take off his sword. Or throw his money pouch on the ground. He’d been searching for the petty varmint who had stolen his property all day under the scorching rays of a bitter sun. The search left him frustrated. His heavy black robes left him sweaty and tired. And, if he was being completely honest with himself, which he very rarely was, he would have to admit that he just wanted to go home and take a nap in his cool cave and forget the whole ordeal. But certain threats had been made, kingdoms put on notice, graves robbed, damsels abducted, so, unfortunately, he was rather beyond the point of simply stopping. In short, he needed his stolen parcel retrieved and a certain level of theatrics were required to do so.
Continue reading “Lucian Boneknitter and The Bandits by Austin Roberts”
Hwang Sunwŏn was born near Pyongyang, the capital of present-day North Korea, and was educated there and at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he majored in English literature. He was barely in his twenties when he published two volumes of poetry. His first volume of stories appeared in 1940. He subsequently concentrated on fiction, producing seven novels and more than a hundred stories. In 1946 he and his family moved from the Soviet-occupied northern sector of Korea to the American-occupied South. He began teaching at Seoul High School in September of that year. Like millions of other Koreans, the Hwang family was displaced by the Korean War (1950-53). From 1957 to 1993 Hwang taught creative writing at Kyung Hee University in Seoul.
Among modern Korea’s short story masters, Hwang Sunwŏn reigns supreme. He was the preeminent short story writer in a nation that prides itself on its accomplishments in that genre. His coming-of-age story “The Cloudburst” is known by every Korean with a middle-school education. And he is the Korean short-fiction writer best represented in the English-speaking world, attracting some of our finest translators. This is the legacy; how did it come about?
Continue reading “Auld Author – Hwang Sunwŏn (1915-2000) by Bruce Fulton”
Translated from the Korean by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton
Continue reading “Three Miniatures by Hwang Sunwŏn”
Tabula rasa, the blank slate, has taken a new meaning in the courtyard. One recent morning I left for work and saw a Red Cat of maybe four months in a window. Almost indigestibly cute, he was a war with the window shade and was, judging by the bent to hell slats, winning a decisive battle.
Continue reading “Week 480: Tabby Rasa and Cat Commandements”
The summer of our wedding my bride Claudia VanderMeer and I leased a split-level duplex on a dead-end street in a close-in gentrifying area of south central Austin, a quiet, in-transition neighborhood of young families and senior citizens and dogs. The opposite side of the duplex was occupied by the owner/landlord, a white-haired University of Texas professor who we figured was gay. We were fine with him being gay (perhaps we even wanted him to be gay), both for philosophical reasons and as a counterpoint to our conspicuously heterosexual, pre-children, pre-jaded bliss.
Continue reading “Quality Photos by Steven McBrearty”
Before data can be captured, it must be desired
Steve F. Anderson
He came out of the tunnel and there she was, perched at one of the patio tables of the Greenleaf Café. Even from that distance her long, jointed legs and oversized sunglasses recalled the grasshopper he’d met that very morning on the bike path.
Continue reading “Pulse by Gregory Golley”
He says I look bad on me.
He says it’s not my fault that no one does us any kindnesses since I’ve never done a kindness for someone else, so how should I know how to receive one.
On a computer at the library, he shows me YouTubes of homeless people getting their hair cut.
“It’s not that hard,” he says.
Neither of us needs a haircut, but he says that’s not the point. The point is that it takes commitment.
Continue reading “Looker by JJ Graham”
literally stories 