He got up and sat on the edge of the bedstead with his back to the window. “It’s better not to sleep at all,” he decided. There was a cold damp draught from the window, however; without getting up he drew the blanket over him and wrapped himself in it. He was not thinking of anything and did not want to think. But one image rose after another, incoherent scraps of thought without beginning or end passed through his mind. He sank into drowsiness. Perhaps the cold, or the dampness, or the dark, or the wind that howled under the window and tossed the trees roused a sort of persistent craving for the fantastic. He kept dwelling on images of flowers, he fancied a charming flower garden, a bright, warm, almost hot day, a holiday—Trinity day. A fine, sumptuous country cottage in the English taste overgrown with fragrant flowers, with flower beds going round the house; the porch, wreathed in climbers, was surrounded with beds of roses. A light, cool staircase, carpeted with rich rugs, was decorated with rare plants in china pots. He noticed particularly in the windows nosegays of tender, white, heavily fragrant narcissus bending over their bright, green, thick long stalks. He was reluctant to move away from them, but he went up the stairs and came into a large, high drawing-room and again everywhere—at the windows, the doors on to the balcony, and on the balcony itself—were flowers. The floors were strewn with freshly-cut fragrant hay, the windows were open, a fresh, cool, light air came into the room. The birds were chirruping under the window, and in the middle of the room, on a table covered with a white satin shroud, stood a coffin. The coffin was covered with white silk and edged with a thick white frill; wreaths of flowers surrounded it on all sides. Among the flowers lay a girl in a white muslin dress, with her arms crossed and pressed on her bosom, as though carved out of marble. But her loose fair hair was wet; there was a wreath of roses on her head. The stern and already rigid profile of her face looked as though chiselled of marble too, and the smile on her pale lips was full of an immense unchildish misery and sorrowful appeal. Svidrigaïlov knew that girl; there was no holy image, no burning candle beside the coffin; no sound of prayers: the girl had drowned herself. She was only fourteen, but her heart was broken. And she had destroyed herself, crushed by an insult that had appalled and amazed that childish soul, had smirched that angel purity with unmerited disgrace and torn from her a last scream of despair, unheeded and brutally disregarded, on a dark night in the cold and wet while the wind howled
The Blog
Third Coast Contest Winner 
Speaking of short stories, I just won the Third Coast fiction competition, judged by Ann Beattie. Many thanks to the editors of that fine journal and to the wonderful Ann Beattie. The story, “Fatu Ma Futi,” in which a young man volunteering in Samoa becomes fascinated by a Samoan cross-dresser, will be published in the […]
Read More Anecdotal Evidence of Rising Book Piracy I know this hardly constitutes a groundbreaking study, but in the last year I've detected an uptick in the number of searches coming to my website looking for pirated books. It's not because I'm writing more about piracy issues — the search terms are different from words of mine. So far I've noticed three different […]
Read More Alyson Hagy: Ghosts of Wyoming Love the prose of Alyson Hagy. Her third collection, Ghosts of Wyoming, just came out from Graywolf Press, and has eight stories highlighting the hardscrabble lives of the rural natives, past and present. The stories were originally published in Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Five Points, and Idaho Review (Every collection I read, I see where the stories […]
Read More Literary Journals Segregating Fiction In the last few years, many prestigious literary journals have moved to a two-tier model for publishing: they maintain their print journal for the big-name authors, and create an online space to publish emerging authors. Granta now has their "New Voices" program, started last year, which publishes new authors online every month. American Short Fiction has […]
Read More Electric Literature #3 Review Issue #3 of Electric Literature just came out, featuring Aimee Bender and Rick Moody, among others. I got my hands on a copy of the print journal, and I’m glad to see that a journal that touts itself as being available on so many digital platforms hasn’t let the print side languish. It’s a beautiful […]
Read More Image Journal #64 I’ve been a subscriber to a number of journals over the years. Recently, I’ve subscribed to Image, but the last issue in particular disappointed me. It only had a single story — disappointing in itself — but even more disappointing was that the story wasn’t any good. The author was Scott Russell Sanders, whose grandiose […]
Read More Ted Conover: The Routes of Man I count myself as one of the many ardent fans of Ted Conover, ever since he wrote Newjack: Guarding Sing-Sing, which is a gritty nonfiction story about prison life. And to think once the prison authorities turned him down for access, he simply got a job as a prison guard. He got to write about […]
Read More Etgar Keret On The Silver Screen The movie is called “$9.99.” No, that’s not the price for streaming it, or some price cross-over from the e-book world. And it’s based on Etgar Keret’s short stories. And it’s stop-motion animation. Fun, fun, fun. It’ll actually sell for $24.98 when it comes out on February 23rd. Here’s the trailer:
Read More Spoiled Salinger Bookslut pointed me toward the Economist blog “More Intelligent Life,” where in a post titled “Salinger’s Spoiled Children” Bradley Freedman describes a friend’s pilgrimage to see JD Salinger and present him with a manifesto demanding more fiction. Freedman, as you can infer from the title of this post, disagrees with his friend’s impulse: But instead of […]
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