Magnificent Octopus

"I know it's temporary." But this is her secret: she doesn't want it to end. What she can never tell Pablo, because he dis...

My mother's a news junkie. It started a few years after my father died. About the time we moved into our new house; we got cable and CNN...

I was waiting at the bus stop, for the bus, when it started to rain, not a downpour but it had more vehemence than a drizzle. It didn't...

Multiple Choice , by Alejandro Zambra, is fiction, nonfiction, poetry, something more, and something else entirely. It consists of 90 though...

In Vancouver a little while ago we peeked in on the exhibit Becoming Animal/Becoming Landscape at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery a...

For this exercise, mark the answer that puts the sentences in the best possible order to form a coherent text. I am reading Multiple Choi...

I understood only later that I can be quietly unhappy, because I'm incapable of violent reactions, I fear them, I prefer to be still, cu...

Train travel is an exercise in suspension, of both time and space; the days blur, we are carried suspended across the land, just above it. A...

We said nothing concrete, I still have those letters [...]. We focused, let's say, on a book he had read, on an article of interest for ...

For a cross-country train journey, people bring a lot of books. But I saw more people carrying them than actually reading them. It's too...

It was like crossing a border. I remember a dense crowd and a sort of humiliating difference. I looked not at the boys but at the girls, the...

As he reads, his eyes graze each poem's lines like a needle over an LP's grooves, atomizing them into letters, reassembling them int...

On December 31st of 1958 Lila had her first episode of dissolving margins. The term isn't mine, she always used it. She said that on tho...

The trumpet announced that life was beautiful, while the violin, barely keeping up, wept drunkenly that it was too fleeting. In Red , by Mag...

"Consciousness is a tragedy. It leads the whole race away from perfection, causes it to fritter its efforts on individual and wasteful ...

This Census-Taker , by China Miéville, is short and creepy, and hints at a much larger narrative. Something small and intense that makes you...

It was as if dawn had been told to come quicker on that side, as if the greater emptiness of the streets sucked the light in. What watchers ...

"When you're worried about something," said Henry abruptly, "have you ever tried thinking in a different language?" ...

A few months ago I rediscovered the library. I had in general thought the English-language selection of fiction pretty paltry. I mean, I...

I was charmed by his conversation, and despite its illusion of being rather modern and digressive (to me, the hallmark of the modern mind is...