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Notes on My Dying
I believe in death with dignity, don’t you? At least in the abstract. Grace. Nobility. Even beauty. As abstract as that. As abstract as other people. As abstract as characters in fiction. “All anyone wants is a good death,” I read. This is in a short story. It’s a prize-winning story, a story about a nurse who is dying of cancer.Issue 18
BETWEEN THE LINES: Report From a College Classroom: After the Terror
In his classic 1936 essay, “Shooting an Elephant,”—a frequently anthologized essay in freshman composition textbooks—George Orwell, an Imperial Indian policeman in service to His Majesty’s empire in 1920s Burma, is goaded by several thousand members of the Burmese populace into killing a testosterone-charged elephant that has been responsible for the death of a laborer.Issue 18
Adventures in Celestial Navigation
You begin by pretending you know exactly where you are. You begin with a fiction.Issue 18 / Issue 24/25 / In Fact
Father
My father has fallen asleep by Athenry, the first stop out of the Galway station. His head is back against the seat, false teeth like a horse, his familiar smell of diesel and damp leather.Issue 18
Bridges
“Prepare for misery,” my client had said of the spring weather before sending me to Elko, Nev., to research community life.Issue 18
Two Years
Togo, West Africa, is a 335-mile-long, 70-mile-wide chip of country wedged between Ghana and Benin. Hugging the prime meridian at 8 degrees above the equator, Togo operates under Greenwich Mean Time. There’s no springing forward to standard time or falling back to daylight-saving time, or Mountain time, or changing to this time or that time.Issue 18
Familiar Things
For six months the chancellor of the university lived next door. In May he and his family went to Disney World. Each morning Vicki fed his dogs, two Labradors named Mousse and Huckleberry.Issue 18
Silver Redhorse
Moulder Branch connected to Hurricane Creek, which fed into the Flint River much farther away than a person could hope to reach without a driver’s license. The Flint, in turn, made its loops away from the mountains through flat cotton and soybean country to pour into the Tennessee.Issue 18
White Girl in Harlem
Shortly after I arrived in New York City, living a few blocks from Harlem as a graduate student at Columbia University, I stopped wanting to leave my apartment. I started to think something was out there waiting for me.Issue 18
Second Chances
Geoff, a plastic surgeon from Fort Wayne, is explaining to a Vietnamese surgeon and Mike, a fourth-year medical student from New Jersey, what he will do to the 5-year-old in front of him.Issue 18