Fiction
Spring 2005
Squirrels
Jane’s very name upset her. When she said, as daily life demanded, who she was—”I’m Jane”—she sometimes couldn’t stand it. All of the name’s thirty years of learning this and […]
Fiction
Spring 2003
Three Figures Out of Schools
They act up in me. Dorse, Faroux, and Jenson: figures from the boarding schools I was sent to, memory’s parents from my displaced homes. The names are listed on my […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1998
Authenticity, Authority, and Application: Buzzati, Kundera, Gordimer
Simple story combines authenticity of action with authority of telling. We need not suspend disbelief or supply relevance. Like Barrie’s Peter Pan, the story asks its audience to clap its […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1997
Story’s Gamble with History
The space, imaginative circumstances, and special logic of fiction’s “once upon a time” now have little voice in any realm beyond themselves. The beliefs that extended this realm into exemplary […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1996
Disorders of Reading Short Novels and Perplexities
Goethe defined the short novel, the novelle, as a contest between the order of dailiness and the chaos of unprecedented incursions. He had in mind a daunting struggle to make […]