Fiction
Fiction | Children of Night
What sort of a fugitive am I, living in a two-car garage, that old temple of middle-class respectability? Simon almost sneered: You're not exactly Anne Frank.
Tunneling
It began, Eleanor would remember later, when she caught him in the basement, masturbating—or so she thought, anyway, for a strange and topsy-turvy moment.She’d come...
The Relic Thief
Although Italians were officially despised by the grownups in Paul’s Irish family, everyone seemed to have at least one Italian best friend. His grandmother Jane,...
Misery Island
Between the man’s finding full-time work again and the boy’s playing park-league baseball and caddying at the Essex County Golf Club, they hardly saw each other all...
Outside Gravity
The story begins on a bright afternoon many years ago, one I remember as though I’d seen it. (This is natural enough in a family like ours, with its canon of...
Labyrinth
The priest, Fr. Monaghan, sat in his office listening to the clock. The office was a small and windowless room behind the auditorium, cluttered with books and...
Saving Women
Miss Havisham—Satis House, England, 1860.
Satis House. Enough House.The name is ironic, given the place’s sad falling off. The garden reeks of ruined...
Misery Will Never End
He was buried in January, in an icy fog, at eight in the morning—about the time when they shoot those condemned to death.There were quite a few people there—from...
Iran, papal terminology, fiction
BETTER EXPECTATIONSI had just finished reading Mark Bowden's 2006 book Guests of the Ayatollah when I picked up Commonweal and read William Pfaff's column on Iran...
Brooklyn, Bewitched
All Brooklyn is under a spell.
Radios blare from every apartment—the game sounds as if it's being broadcast from one distorted loudspeaker—and the...
I Am Awake
Finally, in late June, the village sent a patrol car to sit at the cemetery gate and keep the kids away. Until then, there had been parties at Jake Barry’s grave....
