Traveller_Levin's Blog

Forever Overhead
by David Foster Wallace
Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognize that important things are happening to you.
Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair. There are now more of the hard curled hairs around your privates than you can count without losing track. Other things. Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning. Your face has begun to get shiny when you don’t wash it. And two weeks of a deep and frightening ache this past spring left you with something dropped down from inside: your sack is now full and vulnerable, a commodity to be protected. Hefted and strapped in tight supporters that stripe your buttocks red. You have grown into a new fragility.

Fathers
Alice Munro
On Friday morning last, Harvey Ryan Newcombe, a well-known farmer of Shelby Township, lost his life due to electrocution. The funeral was held Monday afternoon from Reavie Brothers Funeral Home and interment was in Bethel Cemetery. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.
Dahlia Newcombe could not possibly have had anything to do with her father's accident. It had happened when he reached up to turn on a light in a hanging brass socket while standing on the wet floor in a neighbor's stable. He had taken one of his cows there to visit the bull. For some reason that nobody could understand, he was not wearing his rubber boots.

Car Crash While Hitchhiking
Dennis Johnson
A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping... A Cherokee filled with bourbon... A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student...

Separating
John Updike
THE DAY was fair. Brilliant. All that June the weather had mocked the Maples’ internal misery with solid sunlight — golden shafts and cascades of green in which their conversations had wormed unseeing, their sad murmuring selves the only stain in Nature. Usually by this time of the year they had acquired tans; but when they met their elder daughter’s plane on her return from a year in England they were almost as pale as she, though Judith was too dazzled by the sunny opulent jumble of her native land to notice. They did not spoil her homecoming by telling her immediately. Wait a few days, let her recover from jet lag, had been one of their formulations, in that string of gray dialogues — over coffee, over cocktails, over Cointreau — that had shaped the strategy of their dissolution, while the earth performed its annual stunt of renewal unnoticed beyond their closed windows. Richard had thought to leave at Easter; Joan had insisted they wait until the four children were at last assembled, with all exams passed and ceremonies attended, and the bauble of summer to console them. So he had drudged away, in love, in dread, repairing screens, getting the mowers sharpened, rolling and patching their new tennis court.

“Crossing the Zbrucz”
Isaac Babel
Nachdiv 6* has reported that Novograd-Volynsk was taken at dawn today.  The staff has moved out of Krapivno, and our transport is strung like a noisy rearguard along the high road, along the unfading high road that goes from Brest to Warsaw and was build on the bones of muzhiks by Nicholas I.

Teenage Wasteland
 
Anne Tyler (1941~)，出生於美國明尼蘇達州，畢業於杜克大學，繼續在哥倫比亞大學攻讀俄羅斯文學，取得碩士學位，之後遷居於Maryland州的Baltimore。其第9部小說Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant 及第10部小說The Accidental Tourist分別於1983年及1986年入圍普立茲小說獎，The Accidental Tourist備受佳評，於1988年拍成非常成功的電影。Anne Tyler的第11部小說Breathing Lessonst於1989年奪得普立茲小說獎，迄至2012年她已出版19部長篇小說。

Edgemont Drive
by E. L. Doctorow
E. L. Doctorow (1931~) 生於紐約市。美國當代一流小說家，以其獨特之歷史性長篇小說著名。父母是移民美國的俄羅斯猶太人第二代，酷愛書本與音樂。大學就讀於俄亥俄州的Kenyon學院，主修哲學，並於大學劇場演出。後入哥倫比亞大學研究院攻讀英國戲劇一年，值二次大戰徵召入伍。退伍金後，在電影公司當審稿員，出版第一部長篇Welcome to Hard Times，之後轉入出版界擔任編輯，出版第二部長篇Big As Life。1971年出版第三部長篇The Book of Daniel，獲得古根海姆獎。1975年第四部長篇Ragtime問世，這部作品熔事實與虛構於一爐的風格在美國文壇引起轟動，美國評論界授予“全國圖書評論界獎”，承認E. L. Doctorow為打破傳統小說寫作模式大膽創新的傑出作家。如今，Ragtime已成為美國70年代的代表作品之一，被列入美國大學文學課程的必讀書目。本短篇作品收錄於2004年出版之Sweet Land Stories，為其中之佳作。

Guts
by Chuck Palahniuk
Printed in Playboy magazine March 2004
Inhale.

MERMAID FEVER
by Steven Millhauser
The mermaid washed up on our public beach in the early morning of June 19, at approximately 4:30 a.m., according to the most reliable estimates. At 5:06 a.m. the body was discovered by George Caldwell, a forty-year-old postal worker who lived two blocks from the water and was fond of his early morning swim. Caldwell found her lying just below the tide line; he thought she was a teenager who had drowned. The body lay on its side among strings of seaweed and scattered mussel shells. Caldwell stepped back. He did not want trouble. He immediately called 911 on his cell and stood waiting in the near-dark some ten feet from the drowned girl until two police cars and an ambulance pulled up in the beach parking lot. The sun had not yet come up, but a band of sky over the water was turning pearly gray. “I thought she was a high school girl,” Caldwell later told a reporter; we read it in the Listener. “It was still dark out there. I thought she was wearing some sort of a dress with the top torn off. I could tell she didn’t look right. I didn’t want to get too close.” The body was taken to the Vanderhorn Funeral Home on Broadbridge Avenue and examined by the coroner and three local doctors. The initial report stated that the body “had the appearance of a mermaid” but that further tests would have to be conducted before a definitive statement could be issued. Two marine biologists from a nearby university arrived a few hours later and confirmed the accuracy of the initial examination, stating in their confidential report that there could be no doubt the mermaid was authentic.

Miss Lora
By Junot Díaz April 23, 2012
 
Years later, you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care. I’d fuck her.