WELCOME

An old man lives over down there, near the river, where they've gone and put up all those new apartments or condominiums or whatever you want to call them, high-rises climbing to the clouds to block the sun from this insignificant part of the world, on what once upon a time had been open prairie, then farmland, and after that a cramped community of simple laborers, a tract of land cut up into narrow streets, packed with those scrappy shacks that got built after the war to house the families of the workers at the plants on the other side of the river, and that rickety old footbridge offered easy access, so everybody would be able to show up and clock in on time, day or night, twenty-four hours, pumping out beef and pork and corn and wheat to feed a world that used to be world away from here. But all that brouhaha is gone now, leaving the old man's cottage, one of the originals, the last to go, to stand its ground as best it can all on its own. Stone walls, slate roof, chimney at the rear, it sits back from the road, shaded by benevolent trees at the start, then guarded by soaring cranes, now overwhelmed by colossal buildings that rise up on all sides, where rows of lit windows twinkle overhead like stars in a painted sky, gazing down as if the cottage were no more than an empty space, a pinprick abyss in the galaxy of modernity that swirls around it on every side... READ THE REST OF THE STORY HERE

It's night and the cottages are dark. The gaslights on the narrow streets are dim. Dogs are sleeping. Dads are snoring. All this is just as it should be, until the umbra at the edges of the square begins to shift. The street guard looks the other way. He knows his own son is there among the moving shadows, but it's not serious, is it, really? A little mischief from the boys, that's all. Something going on for us to talk about tomorrow, say. It's funny, in a way, or so some will later insist. "Come on now, they're just kids, nobody got hurt." So then what can be the harm?... Read the rest of the story HERE

Winter is deep, and your mother, she's all alone except for the old dog that sleeps near the door because he likes the cold. Frost decorates the windows. She'll lick a fingertip then press it to the glass, leaving a small hole to let the darkness in. She's a widow, poor thing. Your father is only recently deceased and now you, her son, have left her too. To go your own way, you explained. Off on a quest to who knows where, doing who knows what, with who knows who. She rocks and sings, "My boy, my boy," just as she's done since the day that you were born. The wind blows and knocks the trees around, then whistles faintly in the crannies and the cracks to harmonize with the incessant ringing in her ears. She's not well, we get that. She's tender in places you don't want to know about. She aches in places you can't see... Read the whole story HERE

The witch is dead, which leaves you free at last. Rest in peace, mean Mama. No obituary for her, best forgotten soul, because although you tried (maybe), you couldn't come up with anything nice to say about that old woman who wrapped her arms around herself and cried to the heavens, "It isn't fair! Why me?" while you sat alone and unloved upstairs, out of the way. "Get lost," she'd say. "Pest," she'd call you. "Brat!" And then she'd turn around and barge right in to see what you were up to. No privacy. No secrets. There she was, filling up the doorway and no telling what she was going to want from you this time. Sympathy or penance, it could go either way... Read the whole story HERE

You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their feet because that's the only part of themselves that they can really see. Except their hands, you say, and that's good too. Rings and nails and polish and whatnot. Swollen joints. Keloids on the inner wrist. All very telling. But the feet, that's something else... Read the whole story HERE

This isn't the first time that man has visited this cemetery, and he supposes it isn't going to be the last. As a child he was one of the pack of kids from the neighboring sprawl of houses who came here, against all warnings, to scare themselves silly with games of Ghost or Hide-and-Seek or Sardine. They gathered near the hedges where the black angel spreads her wings, looking down on anyone who dares look up. Her expression might be a face of horror or sorrow or rage, depending on the moon and how dark the night. Later, when he and his friends were older, they crept around in pairs and fell against each other, desperate to become one... Read the whole story HERE

All you have to do is spit into a plastic vial and put it in the mail and send it off somewhere, and then in a couple of weeks you'll get the results, and these are going to tell you who you are.

Which is what Ashton Garoutte's mother thought he wanted to know. Not the mother who birthed him, but the mom who adopted him when he was the newborn that was brought to her in a black station wagon in the middle of the night, with a tag tied to his carrier that read, "Baby Boy ___," the name having been left out to protect the apparently disgraced family from unwelcome identification... Read the whole story HERE

It's the desk itself that's of value, and value's what I'm after here. As in, cash. Because what else am I supposed to do with this junk? Time flies all right, but not because I've been having any fun. It flies no matter what you do and faster and faster it seems, so now I can hardly tell one day from the next. Burl feels the same, I know. We go through our days and our days go through us, and here we are, two old goats with a garage full of crap collected by an old woman five years in the ground, an old woman who was a young woman once upon a time, and a beautiful one at that...  Read the whole story HERE

It's called a murmuration, when the starlings flock together and swoop like that, as one, a great cloud of them, moving in synchrony. How do they know? Who keeps the choreography?

Elf is considering the squalor of the kitchen at the north end of his (ex-)girlfriend's trailer. Ariel. Or: that tramp, as his mother calls her, which never fails to make Elf wince and flinch, even though he knows that's just the purpose and the point. His older brother only smiles; his younger brother elbows him and laughs... Read the whole story HERE

A collection of short stories centered on the complications of love and the disorientation of grief.

"Chehak's prose offers an impressive variety of styles, ranging from long, cascading sentences to linguistic parsimony, from short snapshots to longer, more plot-driven narratives. She has a talent for packing a lifetime of retrospection into one or two sentences. Most of the pieces in this book are driven by character, and even the unnamed figures in them are powerfully drawn, if enigmatic. The author also sensitively juxtaposes personal anxiety with its global iteration. A poignant assortment of stylistically daring stories."

— Kirkus Reviews

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"A woman hosts her free-spirit sister, who has returned home to deal with a family crisis. Another copes with her husband’s violent death while his mistress, who witnessed it, collects all the sympathy. A husband and wife, both on their second marriage, confront what makes them need to be with someone. In these 17 stories, Chehak delivers a passel of perspectives from the wiser sides of love and death. Her protagonists are largely in the second half of life; they have reached maturity and yet they are no less hungry for understanding. Generally, they do not react to specific problems in their lives but rather to the aggregate problem of life itself. A wonderful sensation of numbness pervades the stories: Readers don’t witness events so much as sift through memories of them. It is not that Chehak’s characters are unreliable; they simply aren’t interested in feeding the reader a straight account. It’s a haunted world of incidental music half heard or imagined, of tragedies witnessed from a distance or not at all. Characters tread through their realistic, complicated inner lives with a fatalistic sense of humor. The prose is a delight of turned-in logic and vernacular philosophy, allowing the occasional halting statement of bleak brilliance. Never predictable, the narratives twist to unforeseen ends: Characters prove to be not as petty (or far more petty) than previously believed. There is an emotional truth to their lives that readers might like to reject but can’t. Despite all the ways men and women dress themselves up, in houses and marriages and careers and middle age, they can’t help but remain self-preserving beasts at heart. The turns these stories take, structurally and emotionally, prove that Chehak is not only a daring literary artisan, but a connoisseur of human frailty. An acerbic, stirring collection from a master of the craft." -Kirkus Reviews 

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The snow has come early this year. They’re saying it’s going to be a terrible winter. The climate has been having a tantrum from all our neglect, all our abuse. Global warming, is that it?

I’m in mourning, so in a way I welcome the freeze. It seems like it’s going to fit in with my grief just right.

I’m lonely, that’s what.

And I’m a little bit sorry too... Read the whole story HERE

I had a good relationship with my husband. I did. We were married for almost forty-seven years before he died, and of course, it wasn’t always wine and roses, so to speak. But we weren’t the fighting kind, either. More like, we simmered. My marriage to Burton Dell was on a low boil from day one until he died, and it was mostly only alcohol that worked to turn the heat up high enough for that boil to roil and rise and bubble over into loud words, or even violence, but that was just at the beginning and even then only once in a blue moon. By the time all those years had passed and we came to the end, when he was ill and weak and had lost his voice and could hardly move without wincing, then that summer we’d gone flat and cold. Which meant that after he died, I really wasn’t all that much more lonesome than I’d ever been... Read the whole story HERE

The magazines kept coming every week or every month, so it was one or another of them every day, and you didn’t have what we both knew it was going to take to make them stop. That would have meant making some calls to cancel. And then you’d need to find a way to explain the situation. But you just couldn’t bring yourself do it. Pick up the phone, dial the number, say the words that needed to be said. You thought that then the young man on the phone was going to feel a need to pull himself up and argue with you. It was his livelihood at stake, was why. He worked on commission, didn’t he? Just doing my job, he’d say. And then he’d go on to explain that he had debts to pay or mouths to feed. And times were tough, weren’t they? Everybody seemed to think that this was true... Read the whole story HERE

There’s nothing wrong with me. I just happen to be a woman of a certain age, same as any other woman in my particular circumstances. Alone, yes, but maybe this happens to be by choice. And maybe it’s just a temporary thing anyway. Maybe I have a plan and maybe I’ll go through with it. Maybe I’ll show them what I’m made of, though they of all people should know my mettle by now. Maybe I’ll make them pay.

They…who? My husband, for one. Okay, my ex-husband. But this is an old story, one told over and over, everywhere, time and time again. Sure, I was young once. Sure, I was lovely. Maybe even beautiful. Maybe stunningly so. I’d heard this said, now and then. I fell in love with a boy, is what. Or at least I thought it was love. He was the one for me and I for him. Everybody said so. A first date. A second date, and so it goes. Dinner. A movie. The back seat of his father’s car. A blanket in a field somewhere. My mother’s living room sofa. The back seat of his car. His dorm room. My dorm room. His apartment. Mine. And so on and so forth. Wedding. First house. First anniversary. First baby. Second baby. Two miscarriages. Preschool, kindergarten, grade school. PTA. Church. New house. New car. Promotion. Parties. Middle school. High school. College... Read the whole story HERE

The novelist on what atheists and true believers have in common and how Mark Twain, Henry James, and “Sigmund-fucking-Freud” lack imagination.

Read the whole interview HERE

"It begins like a storm—with that pensive heavy stillness of dead air pressing in, with a soft rustle of the wind just barely stirring in the trees, a bruising over of the summer sky, a somber gray and yellow horizon glittery with lightning, bloated full of thunder, swept by sheets of rain—it begins when old man Krejci bumps his head. And then—like that same storm spent, blown past to leave the ground and the air around feeling new and fresh and washed crisp clean—the next morning when Meena peeks into her father's sun-spilled bedroom to find that he has not moved, but is still lying on the bed with his head flat back on the pillow, in just exactly the same way she left him there eight hours before, everything will be changed..."

It begins when Meena Krejci, not sure what to do and fearing she'll be blamed for the injuries that have caused her father's death, panics and takes flight, driving west across Nebraska and into Colorado, where she encounters an apocalypse-predicting madman, his captive sister—the troubled young woman in whose release Meena will create a violent version of rebirth for herself—and a bear.

Told through alternating narratives—a portrayal of the last few days of Meena's life and an account of the events in the past that have brought her to where she is now—this is the story of a woman running away from home for the first time and the strong, nearly universal desire to shed one's identity to become somebody else.

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This isn’t even a house, strictly speaking. It’s just an old rundown shack in the woods on the creek, passed down from father to son to son to me. A getaway from the feminine constraints of duty and decorum, a place where a man could be a man, my dad said, having heard this from his dad who had heard it from his dad first. Play cards. Fish. Hunt. Drink. The jolly old camaraderie of all that. I held onto it more out of laziness than anything else, never guessing that Jimmy’s change of heart would one day provide me with the privilege of calling this place my home... Read the whole story HERE

The Moon Glow cottages were set back in the woods, backdropped by a mountain vista with a drastic drop-off toward the road, and from the front porch—it wasn’t really a porch, more like a stoop, four feet square with barely room for a chair—you could get the full vastness of the view, the sky wide and high and your own puny presence there amongst the chipmunks and the crows.

Sam was no one. He was nothing. She didn’t love him. She didn’t know that he loved her. Or if she did, she didn’t care. They were friends, that was all...  Read the whole story HERE

What she did: went to see a movie alone, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week. She left school and rode the bus downtown. She was fifteen years old. This was sometime in the spring and it was not warm yet, so she had a coat. A poncho, to be exact. And boots and a hat and gloves. Black tights. A sweater. Short skirt. Her hair was short then, too—mod-style. She pierced her ears because sometimes people thought she was a boy, which wasn’t very observant of them. An old woman, a clerk in a department store, peered at her and asked, “What can I do for you, young man?” which shocked her, though she didn’t protest. She was wearing jeans then. And a sweatshirt. She had been looking at toys... Read the whole story HERE

“[Chehak's] ambitiously imaginative novel questions the very nature of reality… [a] diverting exploration of metaphysical concepts. Winsome and smartly playful.” —Kirkus Reviews

After being kicked out of her home by her mother, 17-year-old Mollie Mifflin travels from Nowhere, New York, to the home of Emily and Deacon Molene in Brevity, Iowa. Emily is the author of Mollie’s favorite novel, Forevermore, which tells the implausible story of a pair of goblets that will grant any couple their fondest shared wish. Over the summer, Mollie insinuates herself into the Molenes’ lives—cooking and cleaning, and otherwise making herself indispensable to them—even as they are unaware that she has made their attic her home.

After the Molenes meet John and Sarah Steele, a successful but unhappy young couple, Mollie begins to blur the boundary between reality and fiction, coming to believe that the Molenes have used magic goblets to exchange bodies with the Steeles. Is it possible that Mollie’s suspicions are correct, or is she merely a very troubled teenager? And if this fantastical story is true, is it too late to undo the spell?

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If you were above it all somehow, at a window, say, and high enough over the street to be able to see what happened, but not so far that the details would be blurred. Many floors, or maybe just a few. Six, say. If you were in a room on the sixth floor of a ten-story hotel and you were at the window, having a smoke, say. In a nonsmoking room. With your morning coffee and the newspaper waiting. The bed still warm. The sheets a mess. Your hair a mess too. His shirt on your back. No, not his shirt, because he was already gone by then; that's why you were at the window, not for the smoke, you don't smoke, not anymore, not since you watched your mother gasp her last...  Read the whole story HERE

What we remember

For her it was the days that followed the first catastrophe. The first failure. The first hospitalization. The beginning of the end. The oxygen pump hissed and thumped, and she thought it was music playing. Some techno-pop thing turned low and going on in the background. Some dreary song, repetitive, dull, the kind of music she used to listen to when all was well and she was driving his car, buzzing on Diet Coke, and taking the long way around into town to get something or other, just for the sake of being out. The hiss and the thump on the radio—her heart kept pace with it. She was happy then and all things seemed sharp, bright, filled with promise and purpose. The diamond on her finger, gleaming in the sun. His smile. His teeth. The shine of his skin that paled, then turned dusky. His nose blue first, then purple. The bruise on the back of his leg that never had a chance to brighten back to yellow again...  Read the whole story HERE

My younger sister Daisy lives in New York City, and big whoop. You can tell she thinks that fact makes her special, like she believes she's risking her life just by getting up in the morning every day. She's an actress, but nobody that I know has ever heard of her... Read the whole story HERE

Madlen Cramer has come back home with her two young children to be reunited with her childhood friend Rafe, the sexy drifter who has abducted a four-year-old girl from an abusive foster family, leaving the parents for dead. During this hot Iowa summer, the past will refuse to stay past as painful truths begin to emerge: about Rafe's own foster family; about Madlen's marriage, whose bonds had begun to unravel in the months before her husband's tragic accident; and about her beautiful self-absorbed mother, whose passions bring about the devastating entanglement of two families in an embrace that cannot be undone until Rafe has gone on the rampage that will destroy everything in sight. BUY THE BOOK HERE

Set once again in the heartland of America, this novel pairs two unlikely friends in a dark tale of seduction and murder. It is May Caldwell's sixteenth summer, and life couldn't be more dull in Linwood, Iowa. Vaguely suicidal and haunted by half-remembered scenes from her early childhood, May is a girl waiting for her life to happen. And happen it does with the unexpected arrival of Frances Anne Crane, a.k.a. Frankie, a girl with too much past and nothing to lose. Together they seduce an older man as Frankie awakens all that May has been holding inside: the mystery of her uncle Brodie's illicit past, the painful truth of her grandparents' slow dissolutions, and her own emerging sexuality. Where Frankie leads, May follows, and what's left is a murder no one can pin, a family's buried past resurfaced in a wild night of mayhem, and May's safe world blown to smithereens in this unforgettable of betrayal and desire. BUY THE BOOK HERE

This novel is a tale of illicit passion, transgression, and retribution, set once again in the very heart of middle America. Bader Von Vechten's marriage to Katherine Craig unites the leading families of Cedar Hill and promises to heal the wounds of three generations. But when Bader commences a love affair with a beautiful young man, Katherine is goaded to the desperate act that will change their lives irrevocably, setting in motion the series of tragic events that will play themselves out over two generations. Only twenty-five years later, in the wake of death, murder, and disgrace, can Bader, changed almost beyond recognition, return to Cedar Hill. There a chance encounter affords Bader his last hope for human contact - and redemption. BUY THE BOOK HERE

This novel of love and adultery recounts the story of Clodine Wheeler and the small Midwestern town where she was born and raised. As Clodine tells of her upbringing, courtship, and marriage, her narrative circles ever closer to the troubling secret and shocking death that stand at its center. It is a tale of passion and domestic violence – and their incalculable consequences. No one knows exactly when Lilly Duke, wife of a convicted killer, arrived to seek refuge in a cabin on the shore of Harmony Lake, but her arrival changes Clodine's life forever. At first Lilly finds no friends except Clodine – and Clodine's wayward husband, Galen. But after her child's body is found drifting on the lake, the town crowds to Lilly's aid. Still, no one can explain what Lilly was doing when her baby crept out of the cabin. BUY THE BOOK HERE

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

In the little town of Wizen River, Nebraska, a woman called Annie D. lives out her widowhood in a kind of peace, tending her beloved garden and observing the world around her like people do everywhere. There was a time, when Annie D. was a girl, when Wizen River was about the simplest, most innocent place a person could live. But even small towns change – and not for good. In Wizen River folks have taken to locking their doors at night for the first time ever.
Annie D. can't help but wonder and remember and search her soul for a key to what's long buried and forgotten. And the things she has to say could fill a book. BUY THE BOOK HERE