Online Exclusives

You arrive in a small seaside town where the installations of a little-known artist are currently on view. As you step out a train pipes somewhere up the coast, out of sight. [...]

Take, for example, the phone call. Her father had used pasted-together phrases like “alleged suspicions,” “supposedly missing team member,” and “questioning process,” but then put more emphasis on such remarks as “your help and support,” and “ridiculous, out to get the coach,” and “so you know what’s happening.” [...]

Angel Trumpets grow on the north end of the compound … on the far end near the entrance. They blossom in early spring and last until September. [...]

… The subject is quieted when the object ceases.
         In the first act, she will be dressed in faded gardening clothes, a
         scarf around her head. She will be a comfortable and lively woman. [...]

I withdrew yet farther into my shell, snug as a meadow louse in a weedy mausoleum. I survived on porridge and my own brand of boosterism, which had me pacing the room and inciting imaginary riots in support of my seclusion:  [...]

In a lavender twilight, on the west side of an abandoned pasture gone to hay in the greenest part of our state, a mendicant, a scarved pale beauty with silver bell earrings, curled to sleep on kinked metal filings on the floor of a windowless farm shed gone to rot. [...]

The memory theater burned, and in its ruins I could remember only portions of scripture, commentary, history, poetry, biographies of notable men, successful recipes, homeopathy, botany, and the classification of animals. [...]

Strata of chanting vertebrae           west of the Côte d’Ivoire,

late beside the Niger,        land of cliffs and chockstones 

you have blown through. [...]

This is how we begin: a little paint here; a little dab there. Pointilism is the favored method. [...]

(picture) of cloud body above line of ridge, position itself
being an event on a surface which can’t otherwise be seen [...]

A depiction complains of whose casual hand that made it?
Every figure in the picture is dressed in paper, fading. [...]

The houses were identical all up and down the block. One-story bungalows, oatmeal-colored stucco, with red-shingled roofs and copies of the evening paper folded in triangles on the porches. [...]

Here I am in Geneva. The Swiss have the second-largest standing army in the world. They can mobilize their entire force in less than thirty minutes. [...]

Everything flows, the Greek said from the river bank. Barging down the interstate, we tell you everything fails. [...]

Herman Godfrey lay, not yet breathing, in an empty sitting room, said Godmother Drosselmeier. Empty, that is, except for a grandfather clock and a tall cabinet with a bust of Nefertiti on top of it. [...]