ISSUES | fall 2006

Jade had just turned sixteen. She lived with Coco and Mimi in the second house from the river, a barbershop….Coco and Mimi did business with men.

Featuring the poems: Testimony on What is Important, Chronicle: A Concise Biography of Tyranny, Annals: Inventory

The headline in the upper-right-hand portion of the front page caught Rachel’s attention. “University Police Hunt Library ‘Shoe Soiler,'” it read.

Featuring the poems: Tim off to Charlotte, Shmedlo Talk, Wait for the Beep

He stands in front of the Hertz sign at the train station in Stuttgart, Germany, as we had arranged….A boyish twenty-five, with blond hair and well-scrubbed cheeks, he is what I imagine as the perfect German poster boy of sixty years ago. Then, he would have been dressed in uniform for the Fatherland.

The first ten years of my writing life were spent thinking about voice, tone, control of language, precision of language. Then I had to teach myself to plot. The Virgin Suicides doesn’t have a whole lot of plot. It’s a book that’s carried on its voice to a large measure. With Middlesex, I taught myself plot.

With the publication of This Side of Paradise in early 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald, a Princeton dropout, failed U.S. amy officer and former middling advertising executive, achieved instant celebrity and became a spokesperson for his generation.

A friend recently asked me whether I believed that the short story was a living art or whether it had gone the way of vinyl records. I told her that I knew a guy who listened only to vinyl. This music lover is in fact a music fiend with a twenty-some-thousand-dollar sound system to play his old records. It occurred to me later, though, that my friend and I were mixing up categories in the way that art pundits too often do.

It snowed all over Chicago, but in early February it was only New Year’s in Chinatown. And when the next thaw happened in March, it left gobs of soggy firecracker wrappings all over the streets and sidewalks–spitballs forming a wet cushion of Chinatown mud.

The cop was after Go-Boy because of this list he was posting all over town–because he had scared this girl, Valerie….Go stayed up all night making her a list titled 101 Thing I Love About Valerie.

There is a disorder called “Jerusalem syndrome” that affects one percent of visitors to Jerusalem each year. Gender and race have nothing to do with it, although a Judeo-Christian upbringing helps….One day, all of a sudden, normal tourists will begin to dress in white sheets and make proclamations on street corners.

Featuring the poems: Slow Dance, Classical Poem, The Small Clasp, Public Parks