You are fourteen years old and you spend all your time trying to get Bethany as your scene partner in drama. She is a natural-born actress, and you find yourself holding your breath every time she walks onstage. She looks like Audrey Hepburn and carries herself like...
“Nigger trumps faggot,” Andre told Frankie, spitting blood with the words, a twist of handkerchief stuffed into his left nostril, a line of red between the white cloth and the brown of Andre’s nose. They sat with their backs to the graveyard wall, looking out at the...
Quarter is in the house, in the wider sense of the word that includes the S-2 bus, so I don’t have to check my watch or scam off of someone else’s before going back to my book on why the Anasazi disappeared. I know what time it is: between eight forty-nine and eight...
“Before you were born, I went to stay at a convent in the northern woods,” my mother says. We are seated at a window table in a neocafé, the kind that doesn’t sell giant iced-coffee drinks with fat straws. Instead, we sip tiny cups of searing espresso that require...
Watch an expert carpenter mitre crown moulding, and you get the effect of Perle Besserman’s 2013 novel about turning points which deftly veers around as much of a corner as did The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde in 1886 for fans of Robert Louis Stevenson’s...
