Fiction Attic

interview

Kate Braverman on punk and poetry, the banality of food, an autopsic approach to reading, her new memoir, the literary necessity of San Francisco, and why women writers should say no to soccer, canoeing, Chinese lessons, the pursuit of the mandoline, and other childish whims:

Our cities are named for Spanish saints and butchers. Asia blows in our wind. It is a climate that encourages experimentation and a more confessional approach. That’s why San Francisco has a legacy as an outlaw capital. We welcome the renagade, the outlawed, the visionary and eccentric here. LA does now, but only if the individual is carrying a pass from a studio and can prove they have a movie in a secondary phase of development. Climate has an impact that is defining.

stories:

Abducted, by Stephen Graham Jones

The way Dr. Collins would tell it to his wife would involve some of the things he should have said, about implants, maybe, about how the discs they were both talking about were essentially the same, it was just a matter of scale, of provenance: one came glittering down from the sky, the other across the counter of a pharmacy.

An American Story, by Kelly Lundgren Pietrucha

Behind my mother, on the buffet my husband and I bought together with our wedding money, there is a picture of my grandmother on Ellis Island. She is only eight years old in the photo, strapped to her uncle’s side like paste. I found the picture in my ninth grade history textbook, in a chapter called The American Dream…

How Fish Sleep, by Jane Wong

He felt the slow weight and the white rot of the oranges as he placed them into the garbage pail. It was then that he eased the ladder down, the old latch rusted and willing. In the attic, squirrels were dropping one by one, their tails oily and matted to the wooden slabs. The father stayed there in the attic, cleaning death with the garbage pail.

translation
Giacomo’s Seasons
by Mario Rigoni Stern, translated by Elizabeth Harris-Behling

The last of the Avanguardisti were there now. The days went by with the bugle call: reveille, breakfast, fall-in, flag-raising, prayers for the king, for Il Duce, for the country, for the far-off families. Choir practice: “Rising Sun,” “Youth.” Then gymnastics, close-order drill with muskets, group games for “instilling discipline and order, physical excellence, quick decision-making and reaction time, and for improving all bodily systems.” There were also group hikes in the sacred mountains of the motherland, everyone marching and singing…

the tao of wade
Wade holds forth on Garrison Keillor’s grouchy but lovable side, the mysterious Barnette Dairyette Suite, Dwayne Mason (his office mate, not the singer), and the Shepherd Park Plaza Pulse.

Remember that song “It’s just you and me and we just disagree?” For awhile there was a guy who worked here named Dwayne Mason, which is what I thought the name of the singer of that song was, and I was always making little jokes when I ran into him in the elevator about how he just had that one hit back in the seventies and now look what happened to him. That sort of thing. Anyway, I found out the singer’s name was Dave Mason, not Dwayne, so no wonder that guy never had any idea what I was talking about.

quoth the raven
Mirceau Doviescue, forgotten author of The Girl from Arad, on a certain lady’s bed

On a cold day in Timisoara, it would lure you in and not let go.

letter from…
Latvia, by Zinta Aistars

Around this time, the Soviet Union split open like a rotten fruit, the Iron Curtain crumbled into a rusted heap, and Latvia entered a time of anarchy and rebirth. As excited as we were to see this newborn freedom, it was undeniably a dangerous time, powers being challenged, new governments being formed, and a people struggling to find their way. It was no place to raise two American-born children.