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First Paragraphs
"Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child" by Joy Williams
Baba Iaga had a daughter, a pelican child. This did not please her particularly. The pelican child was stunningly strange and beautiful as well as being very very good, which pleased Baba Iaga even less. It was difficult to live as a pelican in the deep dark woods, but the pelican child never seemed to think she belonged to any place other than here with her bony ill-tempered Baba and the cat and the dog. They all lived in a little hut on chicken legs and they were not uncomfortable. Baba Iaga did not care for visitors so when anyone approached, the chicken legs would move in a circle, turning the house so that the visitor could not find the door. This, too, was acceptable to them all.
"The Resignation Letter of Señor de Santiesteban"
by Javier Marías
Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
Whether it was one of those bizarre occurrences to which Chance never quite manages to accustom us, however often they may arise; or whether Destiny, in a show of prudence, temporarily suspended judgment on the qualities and attributes of the new teacher and delayed intervening, in case such an intervention should later turn out to be a mistake; the fact of the matter is that young Mr. Lilburn did not discover the truth in the strange warnings issued to him by his superior, Mr. Bayo, and other colleagues only a few days after he had joined the Institute, until he was well into the first term and sufficient time had elapsed for him to forget, or at least to postpone thinking about, the possible significance of the warnings. Mr. Lilburn, in any case, belonged to that class of person who, sooner or later, in the course of a hitherto untroubled life, finds his career in ruins and his unshakable beliefs overturned, refuted, and even held up to ridicule by just such an event as concerns us here. It would, therefore, have made little difference if he had never been asked to stay behind to lock up the building.
"Three Figures and a Dog" by Roberto Ransom
He liked to be in the chapel at dawn, and also in the afternoon when something similar, though not identical, occurred. For that to happen, he had to leave home when his wife got up to milk the cow. He'd finally wake himself up by putting his hand into the bucket next to the well and wiping his face. He usually carried a loaf of bread, a piece of onion, and sometimes a little cheese, wrapped in a handkerchief. He'd leave his brushes, pencils, paints, and other tools in a corner of the chapel, behind some stones that hadn't been used during its construction. He didn't paint at that hour. He was waiting for the right color. He'd observe the sky and mix paints in a small clay vessel, smudging them with his finger, measuring quantities, adding water or oil or, on one occasion, wine. He imagined that if the wine was his blood and the blue of the sky he was seeking was the Virgin's color, and the Virgin was his mother and if he and the Virgin were of the same blood, then maybe…
"Byzantium" by Ben Stroud
I was born a disappointment.
"The Bastard" by Patrick deWitt
The Bastard approached the farmhouse on foot, a leather satchel in one hand and a long stick of pine in the other. The sun had dropped behind the mountains, and the heavy evening cold came hurrying into the valley. He watched the smoke spinning from the stone chimney and felt a passionate loathing for every living thing; he spit a slug of mucous over his shoulder and muttered the third-rudest word he knew. Shaking this feeling away, or secreting it, he stepped up the walk to the front door where he was met by the farmer, red-nosed Wilson, who spoke before the Bastard could open his mouth: "There's no work for you here, not even half a day." This was just the opposite of what the Bastard had hoped to hear, and it took no small effort to conceal his disappointment, but his recovery was swift, and without a moment wasted he launched into his performance.
Contributor Bios
MARGARET JULL COSTA is a translator of Spanish and Portuguese literature, including the works of Javier Marías, José Saramago, Eça de Queiros, and Fernando Pessoa. In 2008, Costa won the PEN Translation Prize as well as the Weidenfeld Prize, thus netting the most important translation award on each side of the Atlantic in a single year.
PATRICK DEWITT's debut novel, Ablutions, is now available in paperback. His second novel, The Sisters Brothers, will be published by Ecco in 2011.
AARON JOHNSON is a painter based in Brooklyn. His reverse-painted acrylic-polymer-peel paintings inhabit the realms between the erotic-catastrophic/ecstatic-psychotic/comic-tragic, fusing diverse painting vocabularies into his own distinctive breed of Americana-grotesque, all rendered obsessively with tender brutality. Roberta Smith in The New York Times describes his works as "visceral, beautiful and flamboyantly timely, which is saying a lot." He is represented by Stux Gallery, New York; Irvine Contemporary, Washington DC; and Galleri Brandstrup, Oslo, Norway. Visit the artist's website: aaronjohnsonart.com
BILLY MALONE was born in Johnson City, Tennessee in 1968. He lives and works in New York City. His ballpoint pen drawings are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Progressive Collection.
Admired by Bolaño, Ashbery, Sebald, and Coetzee, JAVIER MARÍAS, born in Madrid in 1951, is widely considered Spain's greatest living writer. He has been translated into thirty-seven languages and acclaimed here as "a rare gift" (The New York Times Book Review), "superb" (Review of Contemporary Fiction), "fantastically original" (Talk), "brilliant" (Virginia Quarterly Review), and "a true genius of literary subterfuge" (The Village Voice). New Directions has published nine of his books; forthcoming are the story collection, While the Women Are Sleeping, and the novella Bad Nature, or, With Elvis in Mexico.
ROBERTO RANSOM was born in Mexico City in 1960. He completed his undergraduate studies at the UNAM, School of Philosophy and Literature, and at La Salle's School of Religious Studies. He obtained his doctoral degree as a Fulbright-García Robles scholar at the University of Virginia. He presently holds tenure at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua, and teaches both in the Institute of Fine Arts and in the School of Humanities postgraduate program. He is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores (Mexico's equivalent of the NEA). He has received an honorary mention from the National Institute of Fine Arts for his novel En esa otra Tierra (Alianza, 1991), and the National Prize for Children's Literature from the same institute in 2003, for Joao y el Oso Antártica (Alfaguara, 2006). He received the Chihuahua Prize for Literature for his short novel, Los Días sin Bárbara (Solar, 2006). Jasper Reid translated his novel/capricho A Tale of Two Lions and it was published by W. W. Norton in 2007 (El Aduanero, 1994). Dan Shapiro obtained an NEA Translator's Grant (2009) for the translation of Ransom's book of stories, Missing Persons, Animals, and Artists (Desaparecidos, Animals, y Artistas, El Guardagujas, CONACULTA, 1999). He is presently working on a book-length essay. He lives in Chihuahua with his wife and three children.
DANIEL SHAPIRO is the translator of Roberto Ransom's Desaparecidos, Animales, y Artistas (Missing Persons, Animals, and Artists). Shapiro received translation fellowships from the NEA and PEN for Ransom's short story collection. His translations and poems have been published in American Poetry Review (Tomás Harris, cover feature, Sept/Oct 1997), Black Warrior Review, BOMB, Confrontation, Poetry Northwest, and Yellow Silk, as well as in The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry. His translation of Cipango, by Chilean poet Tomás Harris, was published by Bucknell University Press in 2010. Shapiro is Director of the Department of Literature at the Americas Society in New York City and Editor of Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas.
BEN STROUD's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in One Story, The American Scholar, Subtropics, Fiction, The Boston Review, and other magazines. He has received residencies from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and recently had a story selected for New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2010. A graduate of the University of Michigan's MFA program, he currently lives in Wiesbaden, Germany.
JOY WILLIAMS is the author of four novels, including The Quick and the Dead, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; three short story collections; and a book of essays, Ill Nature. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Cover
Aaron Johnson
Now We Hunt Hippopotamus
66 x 88 inches
Acrylic on polyester knit mesh
2009
aaronjohnsonart.com
Design: Bill Smith, designSimple