Glimmer Train Stories

Literary short stories! Here's a taste of this issue: Kim Brooks The Shelter The air was hot, but he could not tell if the heat emanated down from the sky or up from the earth. He stepped over a dead man who was wearing a fine wool jacket, holding onto its lapels as if it might do him some good. Where had he gotten a jacket like that? Scott Alan Anderson Saints Alive A bleached-blond woman in a sequined sweatshirt appeared at the door. "That statue is for the feast,"; she said, "and my husband's chair of that feast, and the feast's next week. The saint stays right here." She pointed to the floor with both hands. K.L. Cook The Man Who Fell from the Sky Neil and Ben spilled onto the parking lot with what seemed a million other people. Neil felt again the enormity and absurdity of this event, how exotic to file into this concrete dish with so many other people to watch fifty boys chase a pigskin around for nearly three hours. What a great country. Sari Rose As in Life The former mayor was jailed, re-elected, then died. The rubber factory moved away and the Naugatuck rubber workers took office jobs in Waterbury or line jobs on the other side of town, where they made lipstick tubes and safety pins. Jennifer Moses Child of God All the respectable people, the parents with kids to raise, moved out. Rolaine Hochstein Don't Tell the Cuzzins The cousins were as breathless in their rush for respectability as their ancestors had been in their flight from Europe to escape the Czar, and also, of course, the attentions of everyday anti-semites. Patricia Foster Best Place on Earth While Jed talks about the acreage, John wonders if he's had his eyes closed or if he's just been daydreaming, staring at the light shimmering through the pale green curtains, making them seem thin and gauzy. Caryl Phillips Interview by Kevin Rabalais The type of writers that I read then and the type of writers that I return to now are, for want of a better term, the engineers, people like Faulkner and Márquez, Twain and Conrad…These are not always people I want to read for pleasure, but I read them to try to understand how to move a story, how to get four wheels on a narrative and get it moving. Thisbe Nissen And the Night Goes Off Like a Gun in a Car Kirk's folks have generously been putting me up since we closed on the sale of my parents' apartment, and though I'm appreciative, I can't say I relish the thought of an evening with Stan and Muffy. Or, as some of us prefer, Man and Stuffy. Anasuya Krishnaswamy Notre Bien Aimee "What does the snow taste like?" Safa leans her head back and swallows. "It's like ice, but a very fresh taste on the mountain. Sometimes it tastes like pine, if it's fallen or blown off a tree." Garth Risk Hallberg Jubilee As I watched the cousins it occurred to me that baseball was the one sport that wasn't a metaphor for war. There was no struggle for turf, no real contact. The point, if there was one, was to get home safe. Steve Almond Interview by Aaron Gilbreath The book is the perfect artifact, as is a literary magazine for that matter. It's a lot of consciousness in a very small space.