Mary Swan, "Washington's Teeth"

from Zoetrope: All-Story, Fall 2010, Vol. 14, No. 3

—If she were the same woman who’d left her house this morning, with clean shoes and tidy hair, she could go to that sunny café with the pale wood and hanging plants. But it would be too bright, wouldn’t it, and they might recognize her there—although she doesn’t go often—and wonder what’s gone wrong.


A woman goes about her errands for the day, a trip to the dentist, and to the optometrist, and the coffee shop. Along the way she observes things, remembers things, wonders things.

There seems to be a lot of uncertainty in her life, about things she thinks knows, about her decisions, her appearance, her presence.

She’s someone often on the outside of her own life looking in and constantly aware of the appearance of her actions. She’s the sort of person who is constantly replaying the latest conversation to find the thing she should have said that would have been better, funnier, smarter. She’s the person who goes home to check the facts, to make sure that what she said was actually correct, when she suddenly doubts that her knowledge is trustworthy.

She may have reason to distrust the things a person knows.

A nice simple story.

Téa Obreht, "The Space Elephant"

from Zoetrope: All-Story, Fall 2010, Vol. 14, No. 3


—Now there’s a thought. Where do space elephants come from? Maybe there are plains dotted with herds of them, rising like cathedrals into the sky. Think about it. Think about their yawning life spans, their big rubbery hearts, their rickety-ladder legs. And if an elephant never forgets, consider the memory of a space elephant: how the world, from their height, straightens into points that are sharp, and always far away.


In this story, the narrator interviews an old man about his remarkable house on the beach which is built entirely from driftwood. But the story he really gets is about the man’s Space Elephant. And it’s a lovely, though bitter sweet, story.

There’s a sort of friendly, likable craziness about the old man, and maybe something similar in our narrator who is interviewing him. Both seem to have found, or invented, something that makes the world more interesting for them. But they also both seem to have lost something along the way.

I believe that loss is definitely one of the themes of this story, but also discovery; and is it any less a discovery, any less necessary, if it’s imaginary?

I was moved.

Ben Marcus, "The Moors"

from Tin House, #42


—Thomas’s mistake, like nearly all of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral and emotional dissolution. Death by conversation, and all that. Avoidable, avoidable, avoidable.


This story consists almost entirely of an interior monologue that all occurs in the space of time that it takes for Thomas to follow a colleague down the hallway of his office to the coffee cart, which resides in an area of the office the employees refer to as the Moors, and wait behind her as he ponders whether to speak to her.

There’s some amazing verbal virtuosity on display in this story. A constant barrage of crazed and disturbed wonderings, some of which are hilarious, and some of which are disquieting. There’s a lot of evidence here that Thomas has been pushed a little or a lot over the edge. I think I underlined more passages in this story than I have in any other story in a long time, and I’m not ordinarily an underliner, but I kept finding myself saying—wait, what? Let me read that again!

However, I did have some trouble getting through this story. I think I became overwhelmed with the dense non-stop stream of peculiarity spewing from Thomas’s mind, and had to set the story down a couple of times and come back to it later. Although it may also be that I simply kept trying to read it when I was in no position to give it my full attention. But there was a part of me that I found asking—so when are they going to get to the damn cart? Just how many weird thoughts can actually go through someone’s mind during the span of a walk down a hallway?

Overall though I was impressed and intrigued. I’ll definitely be keeping my eye out for others by this author.

Ron Carlson, "Escape from Prison"

from Tin House, #43


—When you take something that doesn’t belong to you, there is nothing to say about it. You took it and you shouldn’t have. I took it and I shouldn’t have.


This story seems like a simple one on the surface, but I feel like underneath there’s a little bit more going on.

The narrator has done something that he knows is wrong, although he can’t articulate why he did it, and now he’s still sort of lost and trapped in the midst of the fallout from getting caught.

I liked the way the game the children played mirrored the potential punishment the narrator could have faced if charges had been brought, while also mirroring the real self-imposed and familial punishment he was actually experiencing. He was “the Man” and the prisoner. Maybe at the end he was a little less the prisoner.

I rather liked this one. At least it hit the spot for me today on my lunch break. Nothing too intense.

Jennifer Egan, "Out of Body"

from Tin House, #43


—You’ve entered a state of tingling, stomachy happiness that feels the way you hoped adulthood would be as a kid: a blur of lost bearings, release from the drone of meals and homework and church and That’s not a nice way to talk to your sister, Robert Junior: You wanted a brother.


This is one of those unusual stories told in second person. The author repeatedly ascribing actions to “YOU.” Although the central character is clearly someone named Robert. This makes for some occasionally odd moments, and I guess I”m not really sure why the author decided to tell the story from that viewpoint, unless she thought it made Robert’s identity crisis feel more universal. And perhaps it did.

Identity crisis did seem to be the central theme of this one, and Robert was definitely a pretty confused fellow. Unfortunately, I was more interested in learning more about his friend Sasha than following Robert’s confused and drug addled meanderings.

Seth Fried, "Life in the Harem"

from Tin House, #43


—At these thoughts, I realized what it was to be the object of an unwanted desire. My desire for the women of the harem was as unwanted by them as the king’s was by me.


This is a quirky little story about a man who is one night seized by the king’s guards and taken to become part of the king’s harem.

The story goes on to explore the nature of desire; the desire of the king, and the desire of the man himself. And in the end are their desires any different?

As I read this story, I wondered whether it was possible to lose desire for all things except for regaining desire itself? Is there such a thing as meta-desire? Is desire, in some sense or another, an essential human characteristic? Such that even if it is lost it will still exist for itself?

I know, I know—it doesn’t make much sense. But these are the kinds of thoughts I had while reading this story, and I enjoyed having them.

Tin House has an excerpt from the story available here.

Anthony Doerr, "Afterworld"

from McSweeney’s, #34


—Auswanderung: it means emigration. To Esther the word evokes images of butterfly migrations, desert nomads rolling up tents, the long, unpinned chevrons of geese that pass over the house in autumn.

It’s probably no wonder I like the Anthony Doerr story “Afterworld” because it has bicycles and a bike shop in it. Although they don’t really appear until near the end of this short story. In fact, the work is of a length that it probably more appropriately would be classified as a novella than a short story.

In this novella, an elderly Esther is experiencing seizures during which she has very vivid recollections of her time in a jewish orphanage in Germany as the Nazis rise to power. Memories of a time she had pushed out of her mind. But young Esther also had seizures, and also saw visions. Was she seeing the future?

When I saw there was an Anthony Doerr story in this McSweeney’s I immediately planned to read it first. I’ve decided that there is something very compelling about Mr. Doerr’s storytelling. He has a rhythm that is very leisurely, yet that I get absorbed in and find marvelous, and this story did give me something to marvel at. Even though I describe his style as leisurely there’s still a compelling sense of forward motion in his stories, even when he’s jumping backwards in time.

Once again, memory plays a central role in the story, like it also did in “Memory Wall.” Although in that story memory was aided more by technology. In this one memory has actually been suppressed by a combination of medication and trauma. And there may be something beyond memory happening too. Maybe even beyond time.