February 5, 2026 Fiction from “Blue Obstacles” By Kathleen Collins Images courtesy of Hayley O’Malley and reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Kathleen Collins. The following is an excerpt from an unpublished novel manuscript by Kathleen Collins (1942–1988). You can read Alix Beeston’s introduction to the work on the Daily here. This room: contains all the dampness in the world. The sheets are dirty. The floor is cold. Rain runs down the gutters. A step away the door opens and a light clicks. Someone climbs the stairs. The light goes out, leaving them in darkness. I’m in a romantic French hovel. A taxi brought me here in the middle of the night. You carried in my luggage, smoking your pipe and grunting while I kissed you and inhaled the damp odor about you of tobacco and mildew. It was a thrilling moment. I have just arrived in my light blue knit fringed in green, looking like a brown nun. A rough net of black hair controls my face and my eyes focus poorly on things … now on your pointed shoes … now on the unmade bed … now on the dampness, the clutter of your romantic French hovel. Everything is coming to me fresh through your tinted glasses, your severely pointed shoes. You talk about Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, the New York School of poets. I’ve never heard of Andy Warhol, nor Frank O’Hara. It is coming to me fresh, while I settle inside the full pout of your lips and inhale the dampness. You have … an odor about you … an odor about you … all these years I have followed in the wake of an odor about you … Read More
July 2, 2025 Fiction The Glowing Bride By Jhaverchand Meghani A watercolor by Rao Bahadur M. V. Dhurandhar, 1923. Public domain. Jhaverchand Meghani (1896–1947) wrote almost a hundred books—novels, biographies, and collections of stories, poems, songs, and plays. His life’s mission was to preserve the culturally distinct heritage of Saurashtra—a large peninsula jutting into the Arabian Sea from India’s western state, Gujarat, known as Mahatma Gandhi’s birthplace and the last natural habitat for Asiatic lions. In 1922, Meghani embarked on a multiyear journey across Saurashtra to document its oral folklore before it was lost to the forces of colonialism, industrialization, urbanization, and preindependence nationalism. The lack of proper roads or railways meant traveling over treacherous terrain for days on horseback, camel, or bullock cart to meet villagers, rebels, and outlaws. This story, “The Glowing Bride” (original title: “Parnetar”), is from the second volume of a five-volume collection, The Essence of Saurashtra, published between 1923 and 1927. It takes place in Ranavav, the setting of legends from the era of the Ramayana, an ancient Indian epic. In a preface to The Essence of Saurashtra, Meghani insists that his historical figures are depicted simply and truthfully, without embellishment. Like the best folklorists, he recognizes that folktale is “autobiographical ethnography”—how a culture describes itself rather than how outsiders describe it. My translation aims to preserve cultural specificities—the meals, the clothing, the textures of daily life, the Hindu cosmological worldview of the final act—while offering readers a universally resonant story about love, innocence, and the accidents that can shape our lives. —Jenny Bhatt, translator On the western border of Sorath, there is a village called Ranavav. It is named after a famous local well. Once upon a time, farmsteads flourished in that region like perennial blossoms. As newborns clamber over their mother to suckle at her life-giving breasts, so the families of an agrarian Kanbi community ascended the hills and nestled into Mother Earth’s lap to grow grain and earn their livelihoods. This is a story about that time. Kheto Patel was one of the Kanbi landowners in that region. He had a daughter whose luminous beauty earned her the name Ajwaali, meaning “glowing.” But they called her, simply, Anju. Whenever Anju smiled gently, it was as if, for a moment, rays of light radiated everywhere. Starting early in the morning, Anju would cook ten to twelve hearty flatbreads for her father’s meals. She would muck out the stalls that housed their four bulls and clean the courtyard, turning it into a fresh, garden-like sanctuary. Then she would milk their two buffaloes, grasping their udders as thick as a man’s biceps and pulling them so skillfully with her fists that creamy streams of milk would gush forth. Swiftly churning that freshly drawn buffalo milk, she would make as much buttermilk as possible. Many visitors came to offer Kheto marriage proposals for his beautiful, accomplished Anju. Kheto would always reply, “My daughter is still too young.” Read More
April 24, 2025 Fiction Wild Animal Tales By Ludmilla Petrushevskaya Drawing by Bela Shayevich. For Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, who spent much of her childhood in Stalin’s Soviet Union shuttling between orphanages, Young Pioneer camps, and tuberculosis sanatoria, storytelling began as a form of survival. “Every night before bed I’d tell the whole ward a scary story—the kind that makes people hold their breath,” she told me when I interviewed her for The Paris Review’s new Spring issue. Petrushevskaya, who was born in 1938 in Moscow, went on to become a prolific writer, a darling, she says, of the noosphere, a cloud that dictated stories to her “down to the final phrase.” Beginning with her collection Immortal Love, which came out in 1988 and immediately sold out its first run of thirty thousand copies, Petrushevskaya has published dozens of collections of prose, drama, and fairy tales. A mother of three and, subsequently, a grandmother, Petrushevskaya was also always making up stories for her children. From 1993 to 1994, she published a series called Wild Animal Tales in the daily magazine Stolitsa. They feature a cast of recurring characters, including Hussein the Sparrow, Lev Trotsky, Rachel the Amoeba, a.k.a. MuMu (who splits into Ra (Mu) and Chel (Mu)), Officer Lieutenant Volodya the Bear, Zhenya the Frog, Pipa the Foreign Frog, and many, many others. As usual, Petrushevskaya’s work resists easy categorization; while all these creatures are childlike and cute, the things they get up to are squarely adult. How much should a child know about the prevalence of infidelity among mosquitoes? How old should she be when she learns about cockroaches, bedbugs, and flies huffing inhalants? In any case, it is never too late to find out the truth about the creatures who live among us. —Bela Shayevich A Domestic Scene When Stasik the Mosquito fell for Alla the Pig, she wouldn’t even look at him. She just lay there, totally nude on the beach, fanning herself with her ears—he was too scared to even try to fly up to her. Stasik laughed bitterly at his bad luck and his weakness. Meanwhile Alla the Pig had just one thing to say to him: “I know your type!” Stasik pleaded that he only ever had nectar, only his female relations drank blood, he never touched the stuff. Alla the Pig, whose physique was as vast as all our wide-open spaces, was having none of it. She refused to let Stasik land on her, not for just one little second. She had this terrifying habit of making her whole body quiver that caused the hovering Stasik to fall straight out of the air as though he’d been struck, but never struck dead, which was exactly what had him so hooked—he kept on falling and falling, but he could never hit bottom. Finally Stasik’s wife, Tomka, showed up to collect him; enough was enough. She tried to show Alla who was boss, which instantly landed her on the receiving end of an ear thwack. With the infinite patience of so many husbands before him, Stasik dragged Tomka off the battlefield, and on his way out, in passing, he finally managed to make a brief landing, brushing Alla’s incredible body with just the tips of his toes and immediately shooting back up like he’d been stung. Read More
December 12, 2024 Fiction True Love at Dawn By Yukio Mishima Photograph by ジン (多忙中), via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.1 JP. The following short story by Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), newly translated by John Nathan, was first published in the June 1965 issue of Nihon (Japan) magazine. 1. That morning, for the first time in a long while, Ryōichi and his wife refreshed themselves with an exhilarating kiss. In the not-quite morning, they emerged onto the balcony to kiss beneath the merest hint of white in the sky, sensing in the corners of each other’s lips the coolness of dawn air like a sip of peppermint water even while they probed with their tongues the accumulated heat of the long night in their mouths, a kiss, the first in a very long while, they could prolong and never tire of. Roosters were crowing, the trees in the orchard were still shrouded in mist, and though it was May the air was chilly against their skin. Ryōichi’s wife, Reiko, was wearing a blue negligee without sleeves, and because she was standing on her tiptoes to wrap her arms around her husband’s neck her breasts tumbled from the openings below her arms and appeared to be swaying in the gentle morning breeze. Read More
April 24, 2023 Fiction Inertia By Kate Zambreno Michael Raedecker, solo 2021. Courtesy of the artist. In a novel that she had been trying to read the night before, she’d read the description of a late spring day as a glittery day, and she thought of that as she was walking with her daughters, and the dog, up through the boulevards. It was turning from a warm into a hot day, even though it was still morning, and not yet summer. The dog was panting, and they took a break, to drink their bottles of water thrown underneath the stroller. There was something filmy to the skin of her daughters, she had dressed them that day in their lightest clothes, and later, she had promised, they could put on their swimwear at the local splash pad. Before leaving she had quickly pulled their hair off their faces, and now they kept on taking off their hats and handing them to her, and she would throw them in the bottom of the stroller. They needed to get their hair washed tonight, she observed, as she looked at them, their curls greasy with sunscreen. The children had decided they wished to dress alike, or in corresponding colors, and today they were wearing shades of yellow. They were mostly quiet, strolling down the street, the older daughter riding on the attached wooden platform with wheels that trailed behind the stroller that they called the skateboard. She had found a piece of dark yarn and was finger-knitting with it, which she loved to do, or tying a piece of yarn into knots, or wrapping it around and around a stick. It was beginning to be the kind of heat in which one went about in a daze. Sometimes the children wanted to get out to walk and she would hold their hands while their father pushed the stroller, which was laden with provisions for the day. It was such a beautiful walk that morning. The green of the bushes and the trees at this time of year seemed lush and overgrown. Because of this green canopy they were in the shade most of the time, until they had to cross major streets and intersections. She felt that they were walking in a bright encroaching greenness, and had the sensation that they were alone with the trees and the gardens. When she got home she was supposed to work on an essay she had been commissioned to write, on an artist who painted landscapes that felt wild and overgrown like this while remaining strangely suburban. His green paintings felt like they were set in the middle of a forest, often enhanced with black glitter, iridescent beads, and black and green embroidery. There were no figures in his paintings, although there was a narrative, however mysterious, and suggestions of places where children were once playing, or, perhaps, of the abandoning of these spaces, for an unknown reason. There were cars parked outside with their doors left ajar, pairs of tents and treehouses, chairs overturned. This interested her more and more, the strangeness of an emptied landscape, and how then to write of this emptiness. Read More
March 10, 2023 Fiction Season of Grapes By Tennessee Williams Illustration by Na Kim. As I was going to enter college that fall my parents felt that I should build myself up at a summer camp of some sort. They sent me down to a place in the Ozarks on a beautiful lake. It was called a camp but it was not just for boys. It was for both sexes and all ages. It was a rustic, comfortable place. But I was disappointed to find that most of the young people went to another camp several miles down the lake toward the dam. I spent a great deal of time by myself that summer, which is hardly good for a boy of seventeen. It was a dry summer. There were very few days of rain. But the Ozark country with its gentle green hills and clear lakes and rivers did not turn ugly and brown as most countries do in seasons of drought. The willows along the lake remained translucently green, while the hillside forests, toward the end of July, began to look as though they had been splashed with purple, red, and amber wine. Their deepening colors did not suggest dryness nor stoppage of life. They looked, rather, like a flaming excess, a bursting opulence of life. And the air, when you drove through the country in an open car, was faintly flavored with wine, for the grapes grew plentifully that season. While the cornfields yellowed and languished, the purple grapes fairly swarmed from their vines, as though they had formed some secret treaty with nature or dug into some hidden reservoir of subterranean life, and the lean hill-folk piled them into large white baskets and stood along the sunny roads and highways crying, “Grapes, grapes, grapes,” so that your ears as well as your eyes and nostrils and mouth were filled with them, until it seemed that the whole body and soul of the country was somehow translated into this vast efflorescence of sweet purple fruit. Read More