Theo Fales is a one-time historian turned book editor who specializes in ghostwriting the memoirs of leading American policy-makers. For over twenty-five years, Theo has been helping retired generals and CIA directors justify their decisions in the first-person. One day, however, hearing a song at a colleague's memorial service, Theo has a vision: he senses, in the music, a completely different way to live. He becomes obsessed by a need to ...
Emil, the unwanted child of two young parents, is adopted by Yoel and Leah, a childless couple. Yet, as the years pass, it becomes clear that Emil doesn't bear much resemblance to the parents who've loved and raised him. Is his name the only thing his real parents have left him? Kin traces the movements of Emil and his four parents as they walk through the same city, nearby but apart, searching for each other in the faces of passersby; ...
Mathilde Lewly—a female painter at the dawn of the twentieth century—has achieved notoriety among the Parisian avant-garde. She and her husband, also a talented young artist, pursue their separate visions side by side in a Clichy atelier, galvanized by the artistic ferment that surrounds them. But the couple are threatened by the shadow of Mathilde's little sister, Eugenie: since the two girls' sudden departure from their native Englan ...
A woman falls into a coma. Perhaps she's going to die. Becoming the sleeper's shadow, the woman's daughter will accompany her mother through six weeks of agony, bearing witness to the prolonged death imposed upon her by the monstrous machine of modern medicine. During this final voyage through the fog, the narrator attempts to recover the vivacious woman she knew before this illness: the mad lover, the romantic spouse, the musicia ...
Arguably Gordon Lish's masterpiece, Peru begins with its narrator announcing, «There is nothing which I will not tell you if I can think of it.» Gradually, the story of a dark childhood secret—real or imagined—unfolds: in 1940, six-year-old Gordon murdered his harelipped rival, Steven Adinoff, in a Long Island sandbox . . . (unless he didn't). Peru's narrator weaves together strands of disconnected, mesmerizing trivia, resurrectin ...
A madman recalls his first erotic encounter, a priest loses sleep over a heretic, a scholar searches for the anomaly that inspired the Hindu divinities, a spinster hallucinates her own seductions, a pope suckles a wet nurse. Erotic and fiercely funny, these stories range across many centuries and cultures, from Algeria to Egypt to Italy to France, and all demonstrate time and again why Rikki Ducornet has been called «one of the most interesting ...
Winner of the Second Annual Wild Onion Novella Contest, judged by Lindsay Hunter
A tree falls in 1955, and in its wreckage spores of poisonous mushrooms begins to grow. Nearly thirty years later, during the height of the AIDS epidemic, those fungi and the death of acclaimed choreographer Haze Morton bring together his partner, Martin, his lover, Luca, and a reclusive artist, Charlotte Previty. Each of them come to understan ...
The Friday Night Debrief is a romantic comedy that follows Kylie McManus as she leaves her home town of Mount Isa to take a job in Townsville. Alone in a new town, 27-year-old Kylie struggles to find herself and the life she so desperately wants. Hitting rock bottom, she makes a decision to turn bad situations into positive ones. She also joins a sport – Outrigging. One Friday night Kylie invites some of her teammates back to her flat for dr ...
