Fiction
Paris Review Discoveries
My Aunt Gold Teeth
V. S. Naipaul, from 1958
I never knew her real name and it is quite likely that she did have one, though I never heard her called anything but Gold Teeth. She did, indeed, have gold teeth. She had sixteen of them. She had married early and she had married well, and shortly after her marriage she exchanged her perfectly sound teeth for gold ones, to announce to the world that her husband was a man of substance ...
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No. 200 Spring 2012
David Means, The Chair
... I stayed quiet and thought about how just that morning I had gone down and looked out the window at the river and thought it was strange that in the last two weeks Sharon had come home late each night, arriving ...
Matt Sumell, Toast
... I suck at making decisions. My younger brother, on the other hand, doesn’t. He slept with three women, decided he liked the third, and married her. This is despite our on-her-deathbed-in-the-den mother ...
Lorrie Moore, Wings
The sublet she and Dench were in now was a nice one, a fluke, a modern, flat-roofed, stone-and-redwood ranch house with a carport, in a neighborhood that was not far from the hospital and was therefore full of ...
No. 199 Winter 2011
Paul Murray, That's My Bike!
He had a fierce temper on him, did Chips, and when he lost the head there was only one way to get it back. I signaled to Wayne to get a pint over to him quick. “Fast-forward” a minute or two, and there he ...
Clarice Lispector, Two Stories
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF FORGIVENESS Someone who has never stolen is not going to under-stand me. And someone who has never stolen roses will never be able to understand me. When I was little, I stole roses. In ...
Adam Wilson, What's Important Is Feeling
“What is this cockshit?” someone behind me said. I turned. Felix wore camo pants and a sleeveless tee. Hair long and greasy, facial features exaggerated: comically oversize mouth and nose. Like ...
Roberto Bolaño, The Third Reich: Part 4
IN OUR PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS... In August, Udo Berger, a young war-games champion, returned to the Del Mar Hotel, where he used to spend summers as a child. He found the Costa Brava changed, seedier and less ...
No. 198 Fall 2011
Kerry Howley, Pretty Citadel
The revolution is coming, Rhys says so, and it’ll be just like we always dreamed: blood, streets. First day in Yangon, time- lagged and tongue-tied from my trip across the Atlantic. “Things will be ...
Roberto Bolaño, The Third Reich: Part 3
IN OUR PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS... It’s been ten years since Udo Berger, a semipro player of war games, last visited the Del Mar Hotel on Spain’s Costa Brava. Now, on holiday with his adored ...
No. 197 Summer 2011
Roberto Bolaño, The Third Reich: Part II
IN OUR PREVIOUS INSTALLMENT... It is August on the Costa Brava, and life, in the words of young Udo Berger, has never been better. He has brought his adored girlfriend, Ingeborg, to the Hotel Del Mar, ...
Jonathan Lethem, The Empty Room Full Text
Earliest memory: father tripping on strewn toys, hopping with toe outraged, mother’s rolling eyes. For my father had toys himself. He once brought a traffic light home to our apartment on the thirty-somethingth ...
Amie Barrodale, William Wei Full Text
I once brought a girl home because I liked her shoes. That was the only thing I noticed about her. I live in a really small apartment. A lot of my clothes end up piled on my mattress or draped over the open door of ...
No. 196 Spring 2011
Roberto Bolaño, The Third Reich: Part I
By the time of his death in 2003, at age fifty, Roberto Bolaño was already a somewhat legendary figure. A Chilean who spent most of his life in poverty and exile, Bolaño helped found the Infrarealist ...
Joshua Cohen, Emission
This isn’t that classic conceit where you tell a story about someone and it’s really just a story about yourself. My story is pretty simple: About two years after being graduated from college with a ...
No. 195 Winter 2010
Alexandra Kleeman, Fairy Tale
I was sitting at a long table with a lot of nice things on it. There was a large pitcher of water with an ornate handle that looked like it was made of real silver, and there were forks and spoons. There were ...
Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Mine
The buzz of the bell reverberates deep inside Manny’s throat. The girls—showered, shaved, plucked, bleached, perfumed, lotioned, and powdered—arrange themselves in the neon-lit lobby facing the ...
Péter Nádas, Le nu féminin en mouvement
If the taxi hadn’t swerved a second time, in their embarrassment they probably would have leaned back on the seat and continued their chatter in an entirely different direction; it had strayed into dangerous ...
No. 194 Fall 2010
Lydia Davis, Ten Stories from Flaubert
After You Left You wanted me to tell you everything I did after we left each other. Well, I was very sad; it had been so lovely. When I saw your back disappear into the train compartment, I went up on the ...
Sam Lipsyte, The Worm in Philly
April Ayers Lawson, Virgin Full Text
Jake hadn’t meant to stare at her breasts, but there they were, absurdly beautiful, almost glowing above the plunging neckline of the faded blue dress. He’d read the press releases, of course. He ...
No. 193 Summer 2010
Chaz Reetz-Laiolo, Elk Stalled in Snow
Colum McCann, Aisling
Ann Beattie, Hoodie in Xanadu Full Text
Most nights my neighbor, a middle-aged man in a red hoodie, would stand on his front porch, reaching up every now and then to knock the icicle Christmas lights dangling from the porch roof back and forth. ...
Lauren Acampora, Self-Evident
Katherine Dunn, Rhonda Discovers Art
Tweezer Painton was a burly ten-year-old with a glower built into his square mug. His name came from his hobby of grabbing individual hairs on his victims’ heads and yanking them out for fun. Mostly he did it ...
No. 192 Spring 2010
Karl Taro Greenfeld, Thirst
Belle Boggs, Imperial Chrysanthemum
J. Robert Lennon, The Impossible Man Full Text
Around four in the afternoon Tricia sent Clay out to get some ground beef, and because it was the first nice day in a week, and because he wanted a little time alone, and because he was annoyed with Tricia and ...
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