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Portrait of my Father
Richard Lethem The picture floats. Someone took it in the Seventies, but the white backdrop gives no clue. My dad owned that wide-lapel trench coat for fifteen or twenty years, typical thrifty child of...
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From my upstairs windows in Llanystumdwy, near Cricieth in Gwynedd, I can look out on Cardigan Bay, and the sea runs through our house – not literally, of course, but metaphorically, or perhaps...
View ArticleA Ghost Story
I don’t know how I became a dealer. It snuck up on me. I began collecting as a boy in Washington DC, laying down a lifetime pattern of wanting and hunting, of desire, frustration and occasional...
View ArticlePortrait of my Father
The summer I turned twenty-five, I met my parents for a vacation in northern Spain. On our first night together, we went for a stroll by the sea. Along the stretch of a deserted coastline, we happened...
View ArticleDoing the Paperwork
It just wasn’t his strong suit. He hardly did it. He barely kept it, and as he got older he cared even less about the consequences of not doing his paperwork. It wasn’t a form of learnt...
View ArticleThis is Not About Me
My mother thought I was the menopause. She came to terms with the fact that I wasn’t in Buckreddan Maternity Home in Kilwinning, because that was where women went. In those days, the medical...
View ArticleLost Cat
Almost two years ago I lost my cat Gattino. He was very young, still a kitten, at seven months barely an adolescent. He is probably dead but I don’t know for certain. For two weeks after he...
View ArticleSubject+Object
I call it a travelling icon. It is slate, heavier than it looks: dull brown in colour, a little longer and wider than the palm of my hand. On one side, roughly incised, a crucifixion, and on the other...
View ArticleAn Ofrenda for my Mother
I became a writer thanks to a mother who was unhappy being a mother. She was a prisoner-of-war mother, banging on the bars of her cell all her life. Unhappy women do this. She searched for escape...
View ArticleBulletproof Vest
Mexico’s Rural 44 is the only road that leads from his ranch to the cantinas of Valparaiso. Unless he decides to spend the night in a bordello, eventually he will be on that road. But there he is,...
View ArticleGod and Me
When I was seven, I sat down to draw God. God wore a pirate shirt, purple harem pants and a red fez. He sat in cross-legged meditation, the toes of his spangled slippers pointing up. I had a sense...
View ArticleThe Book of the Dead
War correspondent Janine di Giovanni returns to Bosnia in search of the friends and colleagues she left behind when reporting the siege in the early 1990s. There, in her search for Nusrat, the orphan...
View ArticleThe Unwriteable
At Gregori’s, once you’ve paid your twenty dollars and checked your clothes and shoes with the friendly men in the antechamber to the left, you are given a mask – the small black kind, like Zorro’s....
View ArticleRousseau and the Pussycat
I am aware that according to presentday criteria, the story I am about to tell contains several shocking scenes which fall within the realms of sexual harassment and cruelty towards animals. A more...
View ArticleLooking for the Rozziner
Dublin in the mid-1970s. Nine years old. It was a school day, but my father had brought me to work at his newspaper, the Evening Press, where he was features and literary editor. We climbed the...
View ArticleEdenvale
I We brought rings and two witnesses to the Edenvale Home Affairs office because we had been told to. It was 22 February 2009. I had gone to the office, located on a scrappy strip of motor-repair...
View ArticleThe Mercies
Long before any decisions have been made about where or when she might be moving, Sister Nena starts combing the liquor stores early in the morning looking for boxes. She is breaking down the modest...
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