Heartache
She had used the word like a child in a fairy tale: rattlesnake, bone break, morning wake, milkshake. There are words we use, words...
Dying Lessons
1.
My mother sat in the entrance hall of her assisted living residence when I arrived. Her Barbara Bush white hair was brushed neatly, her...
“Eyes” by William H. Gass: A Review
William Gass is a master of the English language. His prose is smooth and muscular: at once honey dripping off a hot tin roof,...
Like Water on Stone – a novel of Armenia
LIKE WATER ON STONE
--two excerpts--
About the book
An award-winning novel in verse, Like Water on Stone is an imaginative reconstruction of the author's grandmother's escape and survival...
The House (The Gardens of Silihdar)
An indelible portrait of a house, and garden, in a long-vanished Constantinople, that formed Zabel's young imagination and gave shape to a writer's abiding sensibility
In the Ruins
"Under a superb, dazzling sun, the devastated city stretches outward like a cemetery without end." Zabel reports on the 1909 massacres in Adana
The Man
“In terror, there is a kind of sublime, delightful pleasure.” A haunted memory from Zabel's student days in Paris.
My Self and I
When I was fourteen, I fell through a hotel window in Russia. It’s a story I have told countless times. The details were chosen...
Astronomy
1.I was born in the Bronx, our building destined to become a burned-out tenement populated by rats, crack heads, meth heads, severed heads. We...
Manger
So I’m with Rosalie at Girl Scouts, like every Wednesday, and I’m passing out the manger pieces I pre-cut with my jigsaw at home. ...
I Want To Tell You Something
Was it your farting woke me? The next sound I hear is such a percussive, protracted arse bleat, and the stink of it hangs so...
ONE OF THOSE CALLS
Drunk and pensive, Chappy does not try and stop himself from calling his ex. Faced with her direct words, he looks, if only for a moment, at himself.