Glimmer Train Stories, #68 - Softcover

Hugh Sheehy; Armand ML Inezian; Ann Beattie; Alvin Handelman; Melanie Rae Thon; Eileen FitzGerald; Evan Lavender-Smith; Ingrid Hill; Interview With Yiyun Li; Sara Whyatt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1595530177 ISBN 13: 9781595530172

Publisher: Glimmer Train Press, Inc., 2008

Synopsis

Literary short stories by established and emerging writers.

Excerpts:

Melanie Rae Thon
Saviors
The ambulance took seventeen astonishing minutes. Willis and Louise sang the whole time, soft and low, sweet rock-a-bye love songs, as if the man were their first and last and most beloved only child.

Armand ML Inezian
See Me
These old memories--the tastes of candies of his youth, pictures of rooms on other continents, the smell of long-defunct hair tonics, conversations with relatives who'd died decades ago--who needed them?

Alvin Handelman
Hurricane Man
When my brother Jeremy died, in 1996, at the age of fifty-eight, I felt as if an enormous hole had been dug out of my chest. I was not lightened by it.

Eileen FitzGerald
Enough Dead Squirrel
They'd found salvation finally in a psychologist, an elfish man who called it a phobia, taught slow breathing, and loved to talk about Mary Poppins--the books, not the movie. "He's a very smart boy," said the doctor. "It's not easy to be a smart boy. Smart means sensitive, and sensitive can make you sad."

Hugh Sheehy
After the Flood
The Mississippi swells up and covers the town and the surrounding forest, devastating all visible creation. Hundreds of egrets fly north; there is no counting the dead.

Ann Beattie
Something, Something
A line of re-gifting impossible to keep track of, a mobius strip of swirling presents, flashing like a conga line of drunks in Tortola at sunset, tenuously connecting a PR person in Paris to a woman in the Florida Keys, then expanding into the universe, eventually to disappear into the Black Hole of gifts.

Evan Lavender-Smith
Bad Numbers
"I thought I was done for, Bob, I thought I was going to die in that old refrigerator. So I took the time to really go over every inch of me, really say a good goodbye to myself. I touched between my toes and along the creases of my eyelids."

Yiyun Li
Interview by Linda B. Swanson-Davies
In Chinese, you have to memorize everything--there's no spelling. You have to memorize probably thousands of characters to be literate. That's a major difficulty for me trying to teach my children Chinese. I can't make them memorize thousands of characters. There are some rules, some logic, like if you put the characters for sun and moon together, you have another character that means bright or light, but you can't read if you don't know how to pronounce a character. It's not like English.

Ingrid Hill
The Light on the Windows at Marienburg
I was eleven, and I'd thought I would graduate from eighth grade at the same school where I'd gone all my life--well, six years--but my mother was taking me to godforsaken postwar Germany, to an army base, so she could marry a lieutenant colonel and we could be fixed for life.

About this edition

• Publisher: Glimmer Train Press, Inc.
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1595530177
• ISBN 13: 9781595530172
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216
• Editor: Linda B. Swanson-Davies, Susan Burmeister-Brown
• Illustrator: Cover By Jane Zwinger