A Not-So-Pretty History of Pet Care
from Granta
As these stories go: I wasn’t sure I even wanted a dog until I was inside the breeder’s home and sat down on the living room floor. All ears and paws Otis plodded over, lifted himself up on my chest, started licking my face. This is my dog, I thought, swept up in the moment…
Excerpt from One of the Boys
from LitHub
My father was swerving around cars, speeding, honking. I rested my head on the strap of the seat belt, tried to ignore how fast he was driving, unsure if he was outrunning the storm or just angry with me. My mother and I had gotten into a fight…
Five Things Right Now
from Granta
1 - The aesthetics of dread. When the Manhattan Project scientists – half-mad from years of grinding out atomic-level discoveries in the race to beat Germany to the bomb – emerged from their Los Alamos lab one morning, they looked up in terror at a strange bright light in the sky. Among the scientists was an astronomer who reassured the group that it was only Venus...
The Bonds of Trauma
from Granta
I recall sitting in the backseat of the car, looking out the side window for cops, while our dad weaved wildly through traffic with a style of driving I’d coined controlled recklessness, a term he loved. My little sister, beside me, had been charged with the view from her window. My older brother sat shotgun, his responsibilities to the front...
A Lamentation of a Lost Age
from Off The Shelf
In my own internal reference library, the brilliance of Denis Johnson’s minimalism is almost without compare. He fashions his most arresting prose from moments of tough, heartbreaking realism. In TRAIN DREAMS, Johnson depicts the hard-fought life of Robert Grainier, a gentle-natured day laborer in the Great Northwest during the first half of the twentieth century...
Powell's Q & A
from Powell's
One of the Boys is an urgently written coming-of-age story that follows a 12-year-old as he watches his father descend into an all-consuming crack and cocaine addiction. The novel begins in the basement bathroom of a suburban home in Kansas, where, through the coercion of the father, the narrator and his older brother drum up damning evidence against their mother to win the war — the father’s term for divorce...