Lorrie Moore: A Gate At The Stairs

Once upon a time…..

 

Are you sitting comfortably, children, ready for a story?  Not if you’re a Yoruba child (thirty million speakers, Benin and Nigeria and elsewhere) . You’re waiting for:

Here is a story! Story it is.

Tracy Ryan: We Are Not Most People

Things we didn’t know about Lemurs

(Lemurs) live in matriarchal troops, with an alpha female at their head. When ring-tailed lemurs are cold and frightened, or when they want to bond, they group together in a furry mass known as a lemur ball, forming a black and white sphere that ranges in size from a football to a bicycle wheel….

The Greenhouse: Audur Ava Olafsdottir

-You won’t get far on dreams, Lobbi, Dad would say.

Quignogs and Quockerwodgers

 

Fernanda Pessoa: The Book Of Disquiet

Not so Nobel

It seemed rather odd when it was announced that the Nobel Prize for Literature wouldn’t be awarded this year because of sex scandals surrounding the husband of a committee member.

V. S. Naipaul: The Enigma Of Arrival

He would have looked out on something like perfection: the lawn with the great trees in the foreground, the forest or wood to one side, the beaten-down water meadow beyond this lawn, with all the growth of willow and reeds and bamboo clumps and dogwood and the shrubs that loved water; the river with its river growths, the water meadows beyond, the willows, the channels, the drowned fields catching the morning light and, at a sufficient distance, the evening light; and then the bare downs again.  (222)