Glimmer Train presents literary short stories by award-winning and upcoming writers. Here are some excerpts:
Cheri Johnson
Guralnick
Whenever one of those little wolves came in on the same pitch as another, the first wolf lifted or dropped its voice to make it sound as if the pack were growing all the time.
Susan Perabo
Why They Run the Way They Do
Sweetie, Tommy says miserably. And right then it becomes apparent that one of us is going to start crying. I m not sure which of us, but either way it s something to be thwarted at all costs.
James Sepsey
Not When a Day Can Be This Good
You re thirty-seven. I need you to be a man. Like your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather. All men. God, you d think it d run in the family at some point.
D.B.C. Pierre
Interview by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais
I never quite believe writers who say they re up at seven a.m. to write a thousand words. They have a cup of tea, and then write two thousand words after lunch. I can t see that happening to me.
Antonya Nelson
Falsetto
He had never been an ordinary boy. He was so thin that people grew angry when he wouldn t eat.
Deborah Tarnoff
Crazy Ukraine Girl
All over the world people are preoccupied with building memorials to help them remember. But the smart ones are busy forgetting.
Susan Petrone
This Is How It Happened
I don t think any of them are in actual denial: they understand that I am dying, they re just getting used to the idea in incremental fashion.
Elissa Minor Rust
In My Mother s Trailer
My girlfriend s son, Charlie, is watching a boy about his age resuscitate a frog on tonight s news. To be fair, the boy is only pretending to resuscitate the frog, a re-enactment of the actual event, which happened earlier in the week.
Christiana Langenberg
Half of What I Know
The theory is the dog committed suicide. My father tells me this when I get home from school, after he says Luigi is gone, and I ask him what he means.
Mary Gaitskill
Interview by Sarah Anne Johnson
I was also going through physical changes, what they euphemistically call the change of life. It was like the ground was shifting under my feet, so it was hard for me to write from a solid place.
Janice Soderling
Rented Rooms
There is a succession of rooms, all of them temporary, as life is temporary. Some of them, many of them, are filled with laughter, with friendship, with affection, with hope.
Andrew Roe
Please Don t Tell Me That We go on one of those streets that seems to repeat itself every few blocks: gas stations, Home Depots, Taco Bells, Burger Kings. After that some apartments or a storage place or a used-car lot, and then the same scene all over again.
Benjamin Percy
The Caves in Oregon
The cave a lava tube runs beneath their house, their neighborhood, and beyond, a vast tunnel that once carried in it molten rock the color of an angry sun.
Cheri Johnson has won the John Engman Literary Prize, the Andrew James Purdy Prize, the Gesell Award, a Loft Mentor Series Award, and a Bush Artist Fellowship.
Susan Perabo is Writer in Residence and Associate Professor of English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Her books include the novel The Broken Places, the story collection, Who Was I Supposed to Be, which was named a Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, and the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
James Sepsey is completing his BA in English. After that he ll teach. This is his first published story.
D.B.C. Pierre won the 2003 Man Booker Prize for his first novel, Vernon God Little. A second novel, Ludmilla s Broken English, and a documentary film, The Last Aztec, appeared in 2006. He now lives in Ireland.
Antonya Nelson has published eight books of fiction, most re-cently Some Fun. She teaches in the creative-writing program at the University of Houston, and lives there, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and in Telluride, Colorado with her husband, writer Robert Boswell, and their two children, Jade and Noah.
Deborah Tarnoff, who died in July 2007 of breast cancer, lived in Greenwich Village and New Paltz, New York. She received an MA in Modern European History from Columbia University and a degree in law from NYU. Her work has appeared in a number of literary journals including The Quarterly and McSweeney's. She won her first writing contest at age twelve when she was awarded first prize in a Hebrew language national contest for an essay on the biblical character most likely to bring about world peace if alive today.
Susan Petrone's plays have had productions and/or staged readings at the Lamb s Club (New York, New York), St. Johns College (Annapolis, Maryland), and the Cleveland Playhouse. Her fiction has been published in Whiskey Island. She is completing her second novel.
Elissa Minor Rust's stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines. The author of the short-story collection, The Prisoner Pear: Stories from the Lake, she is the recipient of the Peregrine Prize for Fiction, the National Society of Arts and Letters Cam Cavanaugh Literature Award, a Honolulu Magazine Fiction Award, the Swarthout Fiction Award, and the Leslie Bradshaw Fiction Fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts.
Christiana Langenberg is the winner of the 2005 Drunken Boat Panliterary Award for Fiction, 2003 Chelsea Award for Fiction, and her stories have been published in numerous literary maga-zines, and a variety of literary formats. She teaches in the English and Women s Studies departments at Iowa State University.
Mary Gaitskill's fiction has been nominated for the National Book Award and for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Perhaps her most famous books are the story collection Bad Behavior, the novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, and her newest book, Veronica.
Janice D. Soderling's work has appeared in significant literary magazines in seven countries, and her poems were twice selected for the Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry.
Andrew Roe s fiction, book reviews and articles have been widely published in these periodicals: Tin House, One Story, New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon.com, and other publications. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he lives in Ocean-side, California, with his wife and son.
Benjamin Percy is the author of two books of short stories, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk. His fiction appears in Esquire, the Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, Chicago Tribune, and many other publications. His honors include the Plimpton Prize and the Pushcart Prize.
