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Category Archives: Fiction

March 29, 2018
Fiction

The Day the Carlton Began to Slip

By Terry Southern

The Carlton Hotel.

This sequence from Terry Southern’s 1959 novel, The Magic Christian, was originally removed over potential libel concerns. Sometime in the early seventies, after the release of the Magic Christian movie, Terry dusted the piece off, hoping to bring his character, “grand guy” Guy Grand, the billionaire trickster, back for a series of new adventures, but the piece didn’t find a home. We are publishing it here for the first time. The massive and opulent Carlton Hotel, built in 1909 in Cannes, continues to be a locus for celebrities and special events held during the Cannes Film Festival.

About a week after Guy Grand purchased the smart Carlton Hotel in Cannes, excavation work was begun, presumably for the purpose of an elaborate expansion of the lower and ground section of this already magnificent structure. Rumor had it that a vast complex of underground passages and rooms were to connect the hotel with the beach area opposite, thus giving Carlton residents—generally acknowledged to be the “smartest of the smart”—direct access to their private oceanfront. In any case, excavation work went ahead on a monumental scale for about three years. Read More
August 21, 2017
Fiction

A Very Brief History of Gouged-Out Eyes

By Daša Drndić

Workshop of Perugino, Study of the Head of a Youth Gazing Upward, late fifteenth–early sixteenth century.

Throughout history, people have often gouged out each other’s eyes, and they still do, only in secret. Through history, the plucking out of eyes then moves from life into literature and painting, where it still lives. As with Dante’s harpies, those winged monsters with the head and torso of a woman, and the tail and talons of a bird of prey, which feed on the leaves of oak trees where suicides crouch, where one such tree preserves the body of the jurist and diplomat Pietro della Vigna (1190–1249), who did kill himself by beating his head against the walls of his prison, but only after the Emperor Frederick II had ordered, Gouge his eyes out. Read More
April 12, 2017
Fiction

… And Other Creatures

By Franz Kafka

Investigations of a Dog and Other Creatures, a collection of Michael Hofmann’s new translations of Kafka stories, is out next month from New Directions. Below, three of our favorites.

Rupert Bunny, Poseidon and Amphitrite, ca. 1913.

Poseidon

Poseidon was sitting at his desk working. The administration of all the waters was a huge task. He could have had as many assistants as he wanted, and in fact he did have a large staff, but since he took his job very seriously and went through all the calculations himself anyway, assistants were of little use to him. One couldn’t say that the work made him happy either; he only did it because it was his to do. Yes, he had often requested happier work, as he put it, but whenever they came back to him with suggestions, it turned out that nothing appealed to him as much as what he was doing. It was actually very difficult to find anything else for him. It was hardly possible to put him in charge of a particular sea, quite apart from the fact that the calculations involved were no less onerous, just more trivial, since great Poseidon was only ever in line for an executive post. And if he was offered a job in a different department, the very thought of it was enough to turn his stomach, his divine breath became restless, his bronze thorax quaked. Not that they took his complaints all that seriously: if a great power kicks up, then you have to be seen to give into him, even in the most hopeless cause; no one seriously thought of having Poseidon removed from office, he had been god of the seas from the beginning of time, and would have to remain such. Read More
May 18, 2015
Fiction

Same Time, Another Planet

By Gunnhild Øyehaug

Image: Santos Gonzales, via Flickr

Read More
January 24, 2014
Fiction

A Freaky Friday Excerpt from the Next McSweeney’s

By Josephine Rowe

Illustration: Carson Murdach

Do not adjust your set. What you see before you is an excerpt from the latest issue of McSweeney’s, our alluring, laid-back, westerly sister. Curiouser still, the McSweeney’s site has an excerpt from our new interview with Geoff Dyer. Have we gone mad? Yes, because we’re also offering an insane deal: a dual, twenty-percent-off subscription to both our magazines. It’s bonkers—we’re practically burning money. Our accountants are tearing their hair out; our lawyers are sweating through their suits. But if you don’t take advantage of this deal, you’re the crazy one—and it’s only available for seven more days. Subscribe now.

SWAN DIVE

All those mornings, our bodies slicked with a sugary sweat. Pure alcohol. You could’ve tasted the night before just by licking our wrists. Stella arcing back so the girls could do body shots from between her perfect breasts. The men drinking and watching, You’re a flexible little thing, aren’t you, sweetheart?

We were inexhaustible in those final few months, throwing ourselves around every chance we got. Our heads might’ve rolled off and we wouldn’t have noticed. Mine probably did. Amanda and Stella started dancing at the Foxhouse two or three nights a week because the money was good and our rent was insane. Then it was three or four nights. They’d show up at the studio in the morning still smelling of tipping dollars. It’s okay if you’re smart about it, they said, stretching at the barre. If you don’t hate it enough to start looking for ways to forget about it.

You should think on it, said Stella, who was spending half the week as Lola.

That accent. They’d eat it up. Amanda was Ruby from Thursday to Saturday.

A swan dive, I guess you could call it.

Sometimes I want to tell you about this, but I won’t. How the hours slammed up against each other. I’d never seen so many sunrises. We’d peel away our damp costumes and step straight into three-dollar g-strings that were only good for a few nights, until the lace was discolored with sweat. The other girls at the club told us we should stick to darker colors: black, navy, even red. Then we wouldn’t be going through so many pairs. But we knew what we were doing. Pale blue. Sugar pink. White, white, white. Let them think we were angelic. We knew how to be angelic. Read More
January 3, 2014
Fiction

Selections from Graveyard of Bitter Oranges: The Dead of Carinthia

By Josef Winkler

Art credit Anthony Cudahy.

This week, we will be running a series of excerpts from Josef Winkler’s Graveyard of Bitter Oranges. Inspired by the author’s stay in Italy after leaving his native Carinthia, the novel was first published in 1990 by Suhrkamp Verlag and its English translation will be published by Contra Mundum Press in 2015.

As a child, I often heard it said that the inhabitants of the village of my birth who had died away from Carinthia had been repatriated and their bodies committed to the soil of their birth. Siegfried Naschenweng, who died in an automobile accident on Golan Heights, was brought first to Vienna in an airplane, and from there repatriated to Kamering in a hearse from the funeral home in Feistritz. One of my mother’s brothers, who fell in the war in Yugoslavia, was repatriated to Feistritz by train. My uncle picked up his mortal remains with a hay cart drawn by two horses and brought them to Kamering, where they lay exposed one more day in his parents’ farmhouse. Apart from all the deceased enumerated and described in this book, the arms, legs, and skulls nailed to the tall stakes that Wilhelm Müller, author of the text to Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, saw in passing from his carriage, while a young priest made the sign of the cross over every piece of the cadaver, are also repatriated to the graveyard of bitter oranges and coated with the ashes from the statue of Saint Florian, patron saint of fire, that the landholders of Kamering burned when the saint allowed the village, which had been built in the form of a cross at the end of the century before, to be reduced to ashes by two children playing with fire, so that it had to be rebuilt, once more in the form of a cross. The corpses of the then five-year-old children who were forced to live with a skull in their chambers in a Trappist monastery, to dine for years on nothing but bread and potatoes that they themselves planted, who were forced to wear a horse’s bit whenever they spoke a word without permission and had to sleep in coffins when they accidentally slept late in the mornings, once again open their eyes in grave number 24 of the graveyard of bitter oranges. Read More