May 12, 2022 Fiction Two in the Afternoon By Mieko Kawakami Illustration by Na Kim. Saki’s Moment Saki once had sex with Jin the Actor, and she couldn’t be any prouder. She hasn’t told anybody yet, so maybe pride isn’t the right word for it. Still, wherever she is, whenever she starts thinking about that intimate moment and everything it means, she slips into ecstasy. She’s in ecstasy when she thinks about how it’s going to feel to share her moment, when she thinks about the day the rest of the world will finally know what happened—when her moment will become a full-fledged point of pride. She imagines standing in front of all the women burning for Jin, the women who fantasize about him. She clears her throat and comes out with it as if delivering the best news they’ve ever heard: I had sex with Jin, Jin the Actor. In bed, in the middle of the afternoon, fair and square. Read More
February 14, 2022 Fiction Sephora on the Champs-Élysées By GauZ Illustration by Matthew Fox (@matteo_zorro). New Recruits The vast office in which the group of Black men find themselves is open-plan. No walls interrupt the space separating them from the glass cage emblazoned with the three letters—CEO—that mark the territory of the alpha male. A huge picture window generously affords a view over the rooftops of Paris. Forms are handed out, left, right, and center. Here, they are recruiting: recruiting security guards. Project-75 has just been granted several major security contracts for a variety of commercial properties in the Paris area. They have an urgent need for massive manpower. Word spread quickly through the African “community”: Congolese, Ivorian, Malians, Guineans, Beninese, Senegalese. Everyone takes out the various papers required for the interview: the identity card, the traditional résumé, and the CQP, a kind of official permit to work in security. Here, it is portentously dubbed a diploma. Then there is the cover letter: “To Whom it May Concern,” “part of a dynamic team,” “a profession with excellent career prospects,” “in keeping with my skills and training,” “please be assured,” et cetera. In a place like this, the medieval circumlocutions and ass-kissing phrases of motivational letters become risible. After all, everyone in the room has a powerful motivation, though what it is may be very different depending upon which side of the glass one finds oneself on. For the alpha male in his glass cage, it is maximum turnover. Hiring as many people as possible is part of the means. For the Black procession outside, it is an escape from unemployment or a zero-hour contract by any means necessary. Security guard is one of those means. The training is absolutely minimal, employers are all too willing to overlook immigration status, the morphological profile is supposedly appropriate: Black men are heavyset, Black men are tall, Black men are strong, Black men are deferential, Black men are scary. It is impossible not to think of this jumble of noble-savage clichés that is atavistically lurking in the mind of every white man responsible for recruitment, and in the mind of every Black man who has come to use these clichés to his advantage. But that is not at issue this morning. No one cares. And, besides, there are Black men on the recruiting team. Everyone fills out his form with a modicum of diligence. Last name, first name, sex, date and place of birth, marital status, Social Security number: this will be the most demanding intellectual challenge of the morning. Even so, a few of the men glance at their neighbors’ forms. Someone coming out of a long period of unemployment lacks self-assurance. Read More
December 22, 2021 Fiction The God of Ferns By Daniel Galera Illustrations by Oliver Munday. An adapted excerpt of the novella by Daniel Galera, translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches. Manuela hates that it’s taking so long. For the past two weeks, she’s hauled her belly up and down the stairs of their building, and along sidewalks where dirty water from the last October rainfall still splashes against her swollen ankles—and she’s sick of it. She wants to sleep belly-down, without pillows to support her. She wants to get up from the toilet without needing to hold on to the sink, to stop being kicked on the inside of her ribs, to have normal sex again. And Lucas, who’s always thought of himself as the kind of guy who can fight off exhaustion, confident in the perpetuum mobile of stamina that’s stored in his guts and keeps him in action no matter how badly he’s being pounded—lately, Lucas has been feeling paralyzed by a fear that he can’t fully understand. He’s scared he won’t make enough money to cover the basics, that Manuela will get hurt, that he’ll have a stroke or a heart attack, that come Monday morning the country will be at war with itself. The autobiography he’d spent six months ghostwriting was published in June, and the book’s subject, a young businessman who competed in ultramarathons all over the world and had a near-death experience in the Atacama Desert, finally wired him the last installment of his advance just a week ago. Now Lucas, who in the past few years has found himself having to settle for more and more freelance assignments, each less inspired than the last, is barely working. He often wonders whether he should finally give up journalism and take a job doing public relations for a construction company, just so they won’t have to move out of the city to the countryside. Maybe, he now realizes, it was a matter of inertia. It’s as if he had wanted to take things slowly for a couple of years to savor the last dregs of inactivity, to ease into this unplanned fatherhood. Some days, he feels sure that he’s done everything he could have, but the truth of the matter is that he’s been in a state of denial. He should have said yes to every depressing, low-paid gig that came his way. He should have harassed his contacts and past clients until he had more work than he knew what to do with. He’s been attending boxing classes religiously at a cheap, dungeon-like gym near Avenida Goethe, where bald, middle-aged bodybuilders give him lip because when they look at him, all they see is a communist hippie who probably took a wrong turn somewhere. In the past few months, he’s exercised even more than usual, as though in response to the fact that his body, unlike Manuela’s, refuses to change. But he knows he’s too old for all of this hard work to make a real difference. Ever since they decided their apartment would be mostly a cigarette-free zone, he’s been going out to smoke at a small square two blocks from the house, where he does pull-ups on the steel bar of the swing set, making everyone around him feel awkward. Not long ago, he’d caught himself smoking and doing pull-ups at the same time, taking a drag of his Camel on the way down and blowing out smoke on the way up, all while his mind fabricated soothing, hyperrealistic scenes in which he died by illness, accident, or suicide. Read More
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