Crossing

(Fiction) It was raining as they drove out of Tacoma that morning. When the first car appeared he could see it from a long way off, dragging a cloud of mist like a parachute, and when it passed he touched the wipers to clear things up and his mind flashed to a scene of a black road, still wet, running toward mountains larded with snow like fatty meat. He looked over at the miniature jeans, the sweatshirt bunched beneath the seat belt’s strap, the hiking boots dangling off the floor like weights. “You OK?” he said. “You have to pee?” He slowed and drove the car onto the shoulder and the boy got out to pee.

Published: Sep 1, 2009
Length: 14 minutes (3,586 words)

The Empty Room

(Fiction) Earliest memory: father tripping on strewn toys, hopping with toe outraged, mother’s rolling eyes. For my father had toys himself. He once brought a traffic light home to our apartment on the thirty-somethingth floor of the tower on Columbus Avenue. The light, its taxi yellow gone matte from pendulum-years above some polluted intersection and crackled like a Ming vase’s glaze where bolts had been overtightened and then eased, sat to one side of the coffee table it was meant to replace as soon as my father found an ­appropriate top. In fact, the traffic light would follow us up the Hudson, to Darby, to the house with the empty room. There it never escaped the garage.

Published: Jun 16, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,540 words)

Mister Lytle: An Essay

When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r. His two grown daughters did call him Daddy. Certainly I never felt even the most obscure impulse to call him Andrew, or “old man,” or any other familiarism, though he frequently gave me to know it would be all right if I were to call him mon vieux. He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, “Breath of My Nostrils.” (National Magazine Award winner 2011)

Published: Oct 1, 2010
Length: 30 minutes (7,507 words)

America’s Ancient Cave Art

And now we arrived at the panel of birds. Tiny birds, each about the size of a silver dollar. Turkey. Hawk. At least one small songbird. Very finely etched into the limestone with a flint tool. Another cave that began and ended in birds. Outside and resting before the hike back to the truck, Simek said, “Think about it. What was there none of in that cave?” I had no answer. Hadn’t there been everything in that cave? “Out of more than three hundred images, there wasn’t a single weapon anywhere,” he said. “We have here an early Mississippian art in which there are no images of violence, where the birds are pure birds, not linked to war—they’re in flight. Even the human figures are not obviously warriors.”

Published: Mar 21, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,220 words)

Voices from Chernobyl

We were newlyweds. We still walked around holding hands, even if we were just going to the store. I would say to him, “I love you.” But I didn’t know then how much. I had no idea . . . We lived in the dormitory of the fire station where he worked. I always knew what was happening—where he was, how he was. One night I heard a noise. I looked out the window. He saw me. “Close the window and go back to sleep. There’s a fire at the reactor. I’ll be back soon.”

Published: Dec 1, 2004
Length: 38 minutes (9,707 words)

An Evening with J. D. Salinger

In the apartment, which was a brownstown further uptown, Salinger asked us what we would like to drink. I offered my help getting out the ice, but no, he’d prefer to do it himself. The bar’s bottles and glasses were arranged at one end of a counter between the small kitchen space and the living room, and we stood around while Salinger poured—whiskey for all, I think. Drinks in hand, Jill, Joe, and I sank into a long sofa across from the bar, Jill sitting between us. Salinger sat down on a chair facing us across a coffee table. In my buzzy contentment I looked around the room at the pictures on the walls, and I lost track of what Joe and Salinger were saying to one another until I heard Joe ask, “Where did you go to college, J. D.?”

Published: Feb 7, 2011
Length: 7 minutes (1,792 words)

The Art of Humor No. 1, Woody Allen

“A word about this interview. It was hard for me because I don’t like to aggrandize my work by discussing its influences or my themes or that kind of thing. That kind of talk is more applicable to works of greater stature. I say this with no false modesty—that I feel I have done no really significant work, whatsoever, in any medium.”

Published: Sep 1, 1995
Length: 28 minutes (7,205 words)

R. Crumb, The Art of Comics No. 1

“The Jews won’t like it because you actually portray God. And the fact that I show people actually having sex, that’s going to eliminate a lot of the Christians.”

Author: Ted Widmer
Published: Jun 1, 2010
Length: 47 minutes (11,802 words)

Gay Talese, The Art of Nonfiction No. 2

“I also use full shirt boards when I’m writing my outlines. I’ve been doing this since the fifties.”

Published: Jul 1, 2009
Length: 14 minutes (3,603 words)