Masthead
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Mark Jay Mirsky
CONSULTING EDITORS
Jennifer Lyons, Ruth S. Mirsky
MANAGING EDITOR
Chris Bonfiglio
ASSISTANT EDITORS
Milena Blue Spruce, Tabor Hollingsworth
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
G. D. Peters, Lissa Weinstein
ART CONSULTANT
Inger Johanne Grytting
WEB AND ONLINE EDITORS
Chris Bonfiglio, Ruth S. Mirsky
EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES
Afsana Ahmed, Francette Carson, Jenniea Carter Katelyn Conroy, Jack Eisenthal, Leah Elimeliah, Sara Jacobson, Sonja Killebrew, Wendy Meza
COPY EDITORS
Milena Blue Spruce, Jo McKendry, Ruth S. Mirsky
DESIGN & LAYOUT
Debbie Berne
Cover Art
Inger Johanne Grytting, M-19, 2019. Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in.
Quotes from the Issue
“[Robert Musil’s writing] itself—each word, each phrase, each image, the rhythm, the lyricism, the sometimes violent, and surprising juxtaposition—is an object lesson and impetus to living more vitally.”
“I was clever: I told her I was a bit hard of hearing on my right side and that I’d like to hear everything she was saying to understand the problem. Now if we could change seats. . . .”
“Thomas ‘Tonsils’ O’Roarke had the devil’s own green eyes.”
“On the front of that card was a picture of a clown, standing in a river, floating on shoes as big as Thanksgiving platters.”
“[Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s memories] are reminiscent of the days of his youth, as Sōseki described it: ‘feelings that lasted but a moment, when loneliness began to spread across its surface like a veil of clouds.’”
“The door opened wide and a woman in a blue silk kimono stood looking out, her eyes and face perfectly still and impassive.”
If you tweet out a picture #FictionNo65 and tag us @fictionmag, we’ll feature your tweet right here on our website!
Number 65 (2021)
This issue of Fiction features an excerpt from Lulu, a forthcoming novel about Hollywood actress turned Saks Fifth Avenue sales clerk, Louise Brooks, by award-winning author Jerome Charyn, a story of a young woman’s secretive meeting while driving back to college by novelist and short story writer Melissa Ostrom, and an atmospheric piece that explores childhood memories of a long dead father by O. Henry Prize winning writer David Ryan.
There are also translations from Chapter III of Uruguayan author Juan Carlos Onetti’s novella, Cuando Entonces, which opens on a man explaining how meeting the mysterious Magda in a bar led to tragedy, a number of in-development stories and musings on life from Robert Musil’s Nachlaß, and fragmentary memories of Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s days as a student.
Scroll down for more information about these and the other writers in the issue or to see short excerpts of their work. You can also read the full version of Lucky’s by emerging writer Katie Edkins Milligan. Her Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize winning story is about a woman working in a Maine BYOB lobster restaurant straight out of high school.
Contents
Where Magda Is Set Aside
Past Lives
String Theory and Other Animals
Angels and Demons
Stay Close
Bible School
Lulu in Love
Memories
Lovers
The Proposal
The Inventor
With care
Christa
Heading for Shore
Lucky’s
Another Tiny Piece of Life
Acquaintance
The Greyhound
Cain Imagined
Special Thanks
• Suzanne Jill Levine translated Where Magda Is Set Aside.
• Genese Grill translated and wrote the introduction to Angels and Demons.
• Thomas Gladysz of the Louise Brooks Society supplied the photographs featured in Lulu in Love.
• Tabor Hollingsworth wrote the introduction to Memories.
• Ryan Choi translated Memories.
Brief Excerpts from the Issue
Further Reading
In the Time of the Plague . . .
Several No. 65 contributors recorded their thoughts and experiences on the Covid-19 pandemic in this special online exclusive.
Louise Brooks: Silent Muse
An article by Thomas Gladysz on the real life silent film star who inspired the eponymous character Lulu in Love by Jerome Charyn and characters works of fiction by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Willem Frederik Hermans, and many other writers.
Notes on the Contributors
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927), born in Tokyo, Japan, was the author of more than 350 works of fiction and nonfiction. Japan’s premier literary award for emerging writers, the Akutagawa Prize, is named after him.
Jerome Charyn’s most recent novel, Sergeant Salinger (2020), is about J. D. Salinger’s harrowing experiences during World War II as an intelligence agent. A new novel, Big Red, about Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles, will be published by Liveright/Norton in 2022.
Ryan Choi is the author of the forthcoming book In Dreams & Other Stories: The Very Short Works of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (London: Paper + Ink, 2021). His work has appeared in The Southern Review, BOMB, Harper’s Magazine, Tin House, and The Yale Review. He lives in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, where he was born and raised. A recent interview with him can be found on the web at: https://thecollidescope.com/2021/06/13/the-colorless-room-an-interview-with-ryanchoi/ and a list of publications at http://www.ryanckchoi.com.
Janice Deal is currently working on a collection of linked short stories, Sick Beasts, which explores the fictional town of Ephrem, Illinois. Her work has won the Cagibi Macaron Prize for fiction, and has appeared in magazines including the Ontario Review, The Sun, Catamaran Literary Reader, and Zone 3. Her first story collection, The Decline of Pigeons, was published by Queen’s Ferry Press in 2013. Learn more about her at janicedeal.com.
Rusty Dolleman lives in Maine with his family. His novella The Megabucks won the 2015 Clay Reynolds Novella prize and was published by Texas Review Press.
Rob Ehle’s fiction has appeared in The New England Review, Epoch, Zyzzyva, American Short Fiction, and similar magazines. The art director at Stanford University Press and a former Stegner Fellow, he is currently working on a historical novel set in late nineteenth-century California, among other projects.
John Fulton has published three books of fiction: Retribution, which won The Southern Review Short Fiction Award, the novel More Than Enough, and The Animal Girl, which was short listed for the Story Prize. His fiction has been awarded the Pushcart Prize and been published in several journals, including Zoetrope, Oxford American, The Missouri Review, and The Southern Review. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Annette Gilson has published New Light, a novel, with Black Heron Press, and is at work on several others. She got her PhD from Washington University in St. Louis and has essays and reviews in a number of journals. She directs the creative writing program at Oakland University in Michigan.
Genese Grill is the author of The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities: Possibility as Reality (Camden House, 2012), and has edited and translated Musil's Thought Flights (2015), Unions (2019), Theater Symptoms (2020), and Robert Musil: Literature and Politics by Klaus Amann and Robert Musil (forthcoming in 2022), all published by Contra Mundum Press. She is also the author of many literary and philosophical essays, collected under the title Portals: Reflections on the Spirit in Matter.
Inger Johanne Grytting is a painter living and working in New York City. In 2018 her work was exhibited in Light Lines, The Work of Jan Groth, Inger Johanne Grytting and Thomas Pihl, at Scandinavia House, New York. Her work can be found in the collections of The National Museum of Art Architecture and Design, Oslo, and in the Stavanger Art Museum. For more info: www.grytting.org.
David Hayden’s writing has appeared in gorse, The Yellow Nib, The Moth, The Stinging Fly, Spolia, Zoetrope, and The Warwick Review, and poetry in PN Review. He was shortlisted for the 25th RTÉ Francis MacManus Short Story prize. Born in Dublin, he has lived in the US and Australia and is now based in Norwich, UK. His debut collection of stories, DARKER WITH THE LIGHTS ON, was published by Transit Books in the US and praised by Eimear McBride.
Jennifer Herman-Kircher’s work is published in numerous literary journals, including North American Review, Prairie Schooner Hobart, Alaska Quarterly Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, The Rumpus, American Literary Review, and The Nebraska Review, where it also won the Fiction Prize. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she holds an MFA 251 from Emerson College. She is working on a novel and a collection of linked fiction, which includes her story “Past Lives,” in this issue of FICTION.
Suzanne Jill Levine, a scholar and writer, has translated a number of the most prominent Latin American authors. A Guggenheim fellow in a career of many other honors, she is now a distinguished professor emerita of the University of California. Among her recent publications are unique works by Silvina Ocampo for City Lights, a five-volume edition of Jorge Luis Borges’s poetry and nonfictions for Penguin paperback classics, Untranslatability Goes Global, edited for Routledge, and her translation of Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (Seven Stories Press, 2020). Her articles, essays and translations have appeared in scores of websites, anthologies and journals including The New Yorker and many past issues of FICTION. Her books include a literary biography of Manuel Puig (FSG, Faber and Faber) and the influential Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction.
Robert Garner McBrearty is the author of five books of fiction, most recently When I Can’t Sleep, a collection of flash fiction. His stories have appeared in many places including the Pushcart Prize, The Missouri Review, New England Review, Narrative and North American Review. His stories have received many awards, including the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award. He currently teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in the Denver area.
Katie Edkins Milligan is a fiction writer from Maine, currently living and working in Texas. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Tahoma Literary Review and North Dakota Quarterly, and she is the 2021 recipient of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction. She is the fiction editor at Gulf Coast and an MFA candidate at the University of Houston, where she is an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow. She has received support from the GrubStreet Short Story Incubator program, the Aspen Summer Words Workshop and the Southampton Writers Conference. Find her at www.katieedkinsmilligan.com.
Mark Jay Mirsky, professor of English at The City College of New York published his first novel, Thou Worm Jacob, in 1967, succeeded by Proceedings of the Rabble, in 1971, Blue Hill Avenue in 1972, and a collection of short novellas and stories, The Secret Table, in 1975 with a cover by Donald Barthelme. In 1977, Mirsky published My Search for the Messiah, a collection of essays including sketches of major Jewish thinkers: Harry Wolfson, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, and Gershom Scholem. His novel, The Red Adam, was published in 1990, The 252 Absent Shakespeare appeared in 1995, followed by Dante Eros and Kabbalah in 2003, a sketch of the poet, Robert Creeley, Creeley, Pressed Wafer in 2007, and a play Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard produced at the Fringe Festival in NYC, 2007. The Drama in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, A Satire to Decay, was published in 2011. In 2014, Mirsky’s novel Puddingstone appeared, and in 2016, a memoir of Ruth S. Mirsky, A Mother’s Steps. Among work he has edited are Rabbinic Fantasies—an anthology co-edited with David Stern in 1990, The Diaries of Robert Musil (1998), The Jews of Pinsk, Volume 1: 1506–1880, in 2008, and Volume 2: 1881–1941, in 2013. “Cain Imagined” in this issue is from a novel currently being circulated by the Jennifer Lyons Agency; chapters on Noah and Jonah have appeared in past issues of FICTION.
Robert Musil (1880–1942) was an Austrian writer, philosopher, experimental psychologist, and engineer. Famous for his unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities, Musil also wrote stories, essays, and plays. Work from his Diaries, plays, and letters has previously been published in FICTION in No. 64; No. 59; No. 60; Vol. 12, #2&3; Vol. 13, #1&2; Vol. 14, #1; Vol. 15, #2; Vol. 16, #1; Vol. 17, #2; Vol. 18, #1; and Vol. 20, #1. No. 64 saw a new translation of “The Completion of Love,” with “Notes on the Writing of Unions.
Noelle Marie Nagales is a Filipino-American contemporary novelist and the author of The way we love. Born in Santa Clara, CA, and raised in Queens, New York, her work primarily focuses on existentialist fiction—inspired by prose and poetry and Japanese literature. Her first novel received The Dortort Family Undergraduate Prize in Creative Writing in 2015, and her short stories have been published in various magazines. She is currently an assistant adjunct professor at The City College of New York and Baruch College, where she teaches English composition and creative writing.
Juan Carlos Onetti (1909–94), winner of the Cervantes Prize in 1980, was a Latin American novelist known for his brilliant narrative technique in a realist mode. He won Uruguay’s National Literature Prize in 1962; imprisoned there in 1974, upon release, he fled to Spain. This is the third extract in FICTION from his penultimate novel, Cuando Entonces, published in 1987. Onetti’s earlier work appeared in FICTION, Volume 4, #3, and Volume 5, #1 in 1976. His works in English include The Goodbyes, A Brief Life, The Shipyard, and Body Snatcher.
Shelly Oria is the author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) and the editor of Indelible in the Hippocampus, Writings from the MeToo Movement (McSweeney’s 2019). Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and on Selected Shorts at Symphony Space, has received a number of awards, and has been translated into several languages. Oria lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she has a private practice as a life and creativity coach. Her website is www.shellyoria.com.
Melissa Ostrom is the author of The Beloved Wild (Feiwel & Friends, 2018), a Junior Library Guild book and an Amelia Bloomer Award selection, and Unleaving (Feiwel & Friends, 2019). Her short stories have appeared in The Florida Review, Fourteen Hills, Passages North, and Ruminate, among other journals, and been selected for The Best Small Fictions 2019 and The Best Microfiction 2020. She teaches English at Genesee Community College and lives with her husband and children in Holley, New York. Reach her at www.melissaostrom.com or on Twitter @melostrom.
David Ryan’s work appears in the current issues of Conjunctions, Diagram, and the Harvard Review. Recent work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Kenyon Review, Bellevue Literary Journal, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. A 2020 Artistic Excellence Fellow with the Connecticut Office of the Arts, he is the author of the story collection Animals in Motion and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in New England College’s low residency program. There’s more about him at www.davidwryan.com.
Chris Wiberg is a Chicago-based writer and editor. His work has appeared in Ninth Letter, The North Atlantic Review, Folio, and Crab Orchard Review. He has taught creative writing at the University of Illinois, where he earned his MFA, and at the University of Chicago Graham School. He has recently completed a novel about the comic book industry of the 1980s and ’90s.
by Chris Wiberg
ON THANKSGIVING DAY of 1977, my father took a Greyhound bus from Minneapolis back to Chicago after spending a week in the Twin Cities settling his own father’s affairs. My mother and I had gone along for the funeral, although I was too young to remember, then taken the car back home. At five o’clock that morning he locked up the house where he’d grown up and took a cab downtown to the bus station, where he made breakfast of a Mars bar and a bottle of Coca-Cola.
The station was packed to capacity even in the predawn—holiday travelers who’d booked at the last minute after the more civilized departures had already filled up. My dad had booked the early trip on purpose, hoping to avoid a crowd. Half the terminal was asleep on their bags or each other’s shoulders; most of the rest nibbled on snacks or sat with glazed eyes and magazines open on their laps. A few parents contended noisily with irate kids, and of course there was one bright-eyed, cheery family sharing juice boxes and playing patty-cake. Every bus terminal in America had at least one. A few chairs were occupied by people he assumed were homeless; it was Thanksgiving and the staff couldn’t bring themselves to boot them out in the cold. But when the bus boarded, my dad was surprised to see one of them get up and climb on board.
Dad claimed an aisle seat near the rear. As the bus filled up, the man he’d pegged for a vagrant came and took the seat across the aisle. He was in a green army jacket and my dad realized that was the thing: he’d seen a lot of homeless vets.