I began to resent what seemed to me the unprovable premise that there existed any useful structure or scheme of ascendable rungs whose rule was that my stories weren’t good enough at first but might be better later on,” he wrote, “and that I should have patience and go on surrendering myself to its clankings. What I felt was that I wanted my stories to be great stories, as good as could be written. And now. And if they weren’t (and they weren’t) that was my own business, my problem, not the concern of some system for orderly advancement in the literary arts.

Winifred, the first-person narrator, works at the post office in Grenville and tries to raise her teenage son Jeremiah to be a respectful young Christian man. Her friend and neighbor Miz K–older and wiser–is raising Lester: a boy Jeremiah’s age who suddenly showed up one day.

The women give Lester and Jeremiah tasks to do to teach them responsibility and deter them from the trouble thirteen-year-olds are wont to get into. They kill and pluck the chickens for dinner and plant corn. After they are caught stealing chickens from neighboring Mr. Sylvester, he teaches them how to raise chickens themselves. The boys are so successful that they build their own chicken coop and start selling their own eggs–at least until tragedy strikes.

You got your stalls lined up on the walk: guava, pineapple, cocoa, spices, nutmeg, curry. Ladies coming in with pineapple sacks swaying on their heads, donkeys trucking pounds of coffee, fish cars on ice gleaming with jack fish and lobster. Chicken crates and goats and pigs for sale sometimes too. The Grenville Junction market always smelling rich with nut and oil and cinnamon…. And often the good-for-nothings come along begging, like old Vincent, he got a leg missing from what the Mongoose Gang lessoned to him. I always give him a bag of guava sweets. It wasn’t his fault his leg got chopped by the Mongoose Gang.

The picture painted of island life is beautifully vivid; Zwerneman doubtless draws on his years living on Grenada to create a world we can touch and taste and smell. In these details it reminds me of the south Pacific island stories of Somerset Maugham, in particular the scene where Winifred’s dinner party is interrupted by a freak invasion of wood ants. Zwerneman’s prose is nothing like Maugham’s, though, and his dialog is decidedly Caribbean. These are strong women that inhabit this island, and they are driven by equal parts fatalism and faith. One gets a sense they will endure; that they will overcome every obstacle in their paths, especially where it concerns their beloved boys.

This story is Zwerneman’s first published work of fiction; it will not be his last. Read an interview with Zwerneman about the piece on the One Story site.

Opening line: ” Near the junction, a path crawls back into the bush.”

The Guardian

Of Ernest Hemingway, Wolff said, ”He’s such a dominant figure in American literature; you can’t ignore him. He’s papa, the great father, and you find that you either have to revere him or kill him. But the work is what counts and the work endures. The short stories, in particular, I still find astonishing.” Brooks also asked Wolff about comparisons between writing today and writing in the 20th Century.

Well, there’s less alcohol than there was in Dublin, that’s for sure. In fact, that’s been one of the big changes during my time as a writer. We all grew up inspired by men like Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Robert Lowell – all of these great authors who drank too much and led these troubled lives. But then, over a period of about four or five years, the whole culture shifted and the drinking just stopped. So writers in America today are very different. They live on the campus, they’re supported by the universities. It’s all extreme health with them. It’s about energy drinks and running programmes.

Wolff’s story “Hunters in the Snow” is available for free.

Borowski’s story “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” is available for free.

There were four main strands that formed the litany of his thinking. First and foremost was drugs of all forms and types, their histories and medicinal uses, and their abused uses, on which he was even more of an expert–in particular acid, marijuana, and crystal, his favorite topic and his favorite drug. . . . [H]e shifted course, and began talking about native culture and native history, his words bent and twisted through his claim (false) that he had native blood, just a generation removed . . . He talked about birds, his key obsession being hawks, falcons, and falconry, a subject he seemed able to expound on for long stretches, despite his limited knowledge . . . his fourth topic was her story, and, since he didn’t have much to go on in the way of details, he made up most of it from the few facts she had given him back in California . . .

Lenny takes the woman to his cabin in the redwoods near Santa Cruz, California where they spend a few days before setting off for Tucson where Lenny has a drug deal to complete. From Tucson they head east, and near the Morenci Copper Mine at the New Mexico border, are stopped by a highway crew cleaning the road ahead from falling rocks. Lenny is enchanted by the female worker who holds the stop sign to control traffic, and he asks her to join them. The three of them continue east to the petroglyph sandstones of  El Morro (pictured), the National Monument near Albuquerque.The woman meets a Park Ranger there, a man of true Zuni ancestry, who believes he knows her by judging her appearance.

Means draws the character Lenny beautifully through his words. There is not an ounce of physical description in the story, yet we know Lenny and are certain we have met other Lennys in our own travels. Means renders Lenny’s chatter without quotation marks so that it blends seamlessly with the narrative–much as it would for the characters who are forced to listen to him for hours in a car.

As for the homeless woman without a name, she wants only for her story to be told–her story: not the version Lenny creates and not the judgmental assumptions of the park ranger, but her own truth. In that way, she is not much different from the ancestral Puebloans who carved up the sandstone centuries ago. She is not much different from any of us.

David Means is one of those rare authors who, in the tradition of Alice Munro, writes only short stories. Two of the interviews he gave last year appeared in the New York Times and The Economist.

Opening line: “You see, some goddess or something lived in this lake, back when it was freshwater, and then she got tired of the place and fled north and took most of the water with her, and now these natives make yearly barefoot pilgrimages down to this muddy hole and dip leaves into the brine and lick them the way you’d lick a lollipop, or something like that, he said, and he continued talking while the desert slid past, slowly, it seemed, because the horizon was so far off and only things that were close zipped by, and she tried hard to avoid looking at the edge of the road, keeping her eyes far out in the desert as possible, letting him go on with whatever subject was at hand.”

Laura tells her young ballet students to move as though they were balancing pearls on their bodies.

Bean, too, had she had the chance, would have one day moved as if she were balancing invisible pearls on her contours. She would have been on of the girls who now moved from one corner of the room to the opposite, leaping and turning across the floor in pairs. Instead, Bean was in the pearls. She was balled up inside them as they dropped from clumsy arms and bounced against the wood and rolled under the stereo where they caught in cobwebs and gathered in piles. Laura could feel her in the room and struggled to ignore her. She could sense her in the girls, all thirty-six of them with their healthy bodies and bottomless reserves of energy. [Bean] tumbled in the dust that the girls kicked up with their chaînés turns and chassés and jetés, the dust that clumped in the corners along with gold hairs and black hairs and dirt, to be swept away later.

Wurzbacher, who won the 2007 Allegheny Review Prize for Fiction, is completing her PhD in Literature from the University of Houston. Her short story “Foreign Girl” is available online for free from the University of New Hampshire’s online literary magazine Barnstorm.

The New Yorker

“Ocean 1212” essay by Sylvia Plath, recalling the great New England Hurricane of 1938 (depicted in the photo from the blog)

“Upon the Sweeping Flood” by Joyce Carol Oates, where protagonist Walter Stuart tries to save two teenagers from a hurricane

“Typhoon” by Joseph Conrad, where Captain MacWhirr is annoyed at the inconvenience of a storm at sea

The magazine’s own “Critic at Large” piece on Rimbaud by Daniel Mendelsohn, paired with Rimbaud’s own poem “The Drunken Boat”

“The Center of the Story” by Lydia Davis, where a writer tries to finish a story about a hurricane

“Visions of Cody” by Jack Kerouac (read the portion that describes the same 1938 hurricane in Plath’s essay),

King is no stranger to electronic publishing. His novella “Riding the Bullet” was an internet sensation when he published it in 2000.

On an unrelated note, King announced at a press conference today in Bangor, Maine that he would host a left-leaning radio talk show. “We’re a little to the left, but we’re right,” he said.

Since Janice Hadda’s 1998 biography people have come to realise that Singer, far from being the twinkly, ascetic old folklorist and chronicler of the Yiddish tradition, was in fact a randy, calculating old git who cared at least as assiduously about maintaining his own good reputation as he did about his prose. Recalling his vegetarian diet at the 1978 Nobel dinner, Saul Bellow, who had translated Singer’s breakthrough story, “Gimpel the Fool”, said: “he may have been on a green diet but he hadn’t stopped drinking blood.” And it is interesting that when his stories were translated from Yiddish he altered them substantially, removing, for instance, much of the anti-Christian elements which he felt would not have gone down very well in America.