This slender narrative has no pretensions to the regularity of a story, or the development of situations and feelings; it is but a slight sketch, delivered nearly as it was narrated to me by one of...
BY A PARTIAL, PREJUDICED, AND IGNORANT HISTORIAN. To Miss Austen, eldest daughter of the Rev. George Austen, this work is inscribed with all due respect by THE AUTHOR. N.B. There will be very few Dates in...
For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds...
That night we were having guests for dinner, and Ines had been in a frenzy all week. She hunted down innovative recipes on the internet and buried my desk in sheets of paper as she printed...
And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled...
Dr. Spencer looked up from his misery to the long, winding lines— dark eyes, brown clothes, the occasional red and yellow native costume—and each day before this and after seemed a wretched sameness to him, as...
My mother said to me: ‘You must go to school, or they will lock up your father.’ There were five of us children at home, four girls and one boy. The eldest was my sister, then...
“Sonya, how could you? How can you wear those short dresses covered with pea-green dots?” “Sonya, have you said your prayers?” “Sonya, how can you listen to those fascists?” “Sonya, have you read Sholem Aleichem?”...
Lena was patient, gentle, sweet and german. She had been a servant for four years and had liked it very well. Lena had been brought from Germany to Bridgepoint by a cousin and had been in...
There was always, in the square, a curious and ancient rentable stagecoach that no one ever rented. The dozing coachman would shake himself awake at the striking of the hours from the bell tower, then his...
The autumn felt more like summer than the summer had. I was wearing my blue silk dress, and I had the little Pekinese they’d given me for my birthday when I arrived at my boyfriend’s house....
The week after was one off the busiest weeks of their lives. Even when they went to bed it was only their bodies that lay down and rested; their minds went on, thinking things out, talking...
Many years ago, before the days of highways-speed internet and underground tunnels, before natural gas drilling sites ever existed, human beings lived here side-by-side with jinn. Today it may sound strange, but back then it was...
Kunfoosa the Terrible Or: How to tell the difference between harmless pets and very harmful jinn
Tamar Hochstadter
Yasha Hein woke up while it was still dark – long before the alarm clock rang – because of a strange quietness that was filling him up from within. During the evening of the previous day...
We Weren’t actually at starvation’s door, although even that depends on how you look at it – the house was in ruins, windows missing, the living-room armchair shot to pieces, a crack in the wall, the...
1. AZIZ Our small room in Motel 6 smells like depressing sex that someone tried to scrub off with lots bleach. Gershon and I sit on the bed and start scribbling calculations on a napkin....
How could Edgardo have hunted an animal if he didn’t even know how to love, much less kill. He’d become a useless idler, sitting all day in front of the television set or on the computer...
When I was a little girl my mother had a fungus on one of her toenails. On her left pinkie toe to be exact. From the moment she discovered it she tried everything to get rid...
(From Letters to the Editor) We chose this letter amongst hundreds of letters that the newspaper receives. The reader preferred to sign his letter with R.A.; he asked for it to be published in the...
A Turkish philosopher from Istanbul once visited me in Berlin. He was only there for a few days. He looked at the street and said quietly, ‘I don’t think I could live here.’ Not the...
I came across him the other day when I was looking for the snorkel fins in the storage space. I didn’t even remember that I’d left him there. He was covered in dust and had a...
The last item on the shopping list was bread. Two o’clock in the afternoon. August. And the insistence to walk all the way to the bread shop. Specification is the sign of affluence and civilization; that...
That summer, I’d go there sometimes, and this week, I went again. It was a hot day at the end of summer. A hot wind blew from time to time, stopped suddenly and returned suddenly, full...
Miriam tells them that he built the house himself with his own hands. She tells them how he piled up the rocks on rainy days, so that they’d get good and soaked before he soldered them...