By Night In Chile

By Night In Chile

Every now and then, Farewell burst into excessively sonorous laughter. At each of these guffaws, I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. He looked like the god Pan, or Bacchus in his den, or some demented Spanish conquistador ensconced in a southern fort. The...
The Overstory

The Overstory

The things she catches Doug-firs doing, over the course of these years, fill her with joy. When the lateral roots of two Douglas-firs run into each other underground, they fuse. Through those self-grafted knots, the two trees join their vascular systems together and...
Homegoing

Homegoing

In the other room, Beulah started whimpering in her sleep. The child had night terrors. They came at unpredictable intervals: one month here, two days there. Some days they were so bad she would wake herself up to the sound of her own screams or she’d have scratches...
The Sound And The Fury

The Sound And The Fury

A sparrow slanted across the sunlight, onto the window ledge, and cocked his head at me. His eye was round and bright. First he’d watch me with one eye, then flick! and it would be the other one, his throat pumping faster than any pulse. The hour began to...
Alias Grace

Alias Grace

My mother and Aunt Pauline were a dead clergyman’s daughters – a Methodist, he was – and it was said their father had done something unexpected with the church money, and after that could not get a position; and when he died they were penniless, and were turned out to...