TOBI'S DESK

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

Vedbæk, Denmark. MchD, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons . Halfway through Sven Holm’s taut unfolding nightmare, Termush , the unnamed narrator encounters “ploughed-up and trampled gardens” where “stone creatures are the sole survivors.” Holm describes these statues as “curious forms, the bodies like great ill-defined blocks, designed more to evoke a sense of weight and mass than to suggest power in the muscles and sinews.” Later, a guest of the gated, walled hotel for the rich from which the novel takes its name relates a dream in which “light streamed out of every object; it shone through robes and skin and the flesh on the bones, the leaves on the trees … to reveal the innermost vulnerable marrow of people and plants.” The same could describe the novel, which accrues its strange effects via both this stricken, continuous revealing and the “curious forms” of a solid, impervious setting, in which the ordinary elements of our world come to seem alien through the lens of nuclear c...

Photograph by Agustina Fernández. Hebe Uhart had a unique way of looking—a power of observation that was streaked with humor, but which above all spoke to her tremendous curiosity. Uhart, a prolific  Argentine writer of novels, short stories, and travel logs, died in 2018. “In the last years of her life, Hebe Uhart read as much fiction as nonfiction, but she preferred writing crónicas, she used to say, because she felt that what the world had to offer was more interesting than her own experience or imagination,” writes Mariana  Enríquez in an introduction to a newly translated volume of these crónicas , which will be published in May by Archipelago Books. At the Review , where we published one of Uhart’s short stories posthumously in 2019, we will be publishing a series of these crónicas in the coming months, starting with one of the most personal. About thirty years ago, I had a boyfriend who was a drunk. Back then, I was full of vague impulses and concocted impossi...

Photograph by Stefan Marolachakis, courtesy of Sam Axelrod. I turned nineteen and moved to Chicago. Three weeks later, Dave and I bought a silver Celica for five hundred bucks, which, even in 1999, didn’t seem like much for an entire car. Dave named her Angie (short for Angelica, inspired by the elica on the grille, the C having gone missing sometime in the previous eleven years). He was a sophomore at the University of Chicago, and I was his deadbeat friend who had moved to Hyde Park to get out of my parents’ apartment and go be a dropout eight hundred miles away. We liked to think Angie resembled a low-rent DeLorean. The headlights opened and closed—creaking up and down like animatronic eyes—but shortly after the big purchase they got stuck in the up position. When we test-drove the car around Ravenswood, the steering wheel felt disconcertingly heavy. Oh, that’s just a minor power-steering leak, said the seller. Easy fix. We didn’t know what power steering was, or that the leak...

A madeleine. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The other day, I graduated from an iPhone 6 to an iPhone 15. The iPhone 6 needed to be plugged in all the time, same as me. The next day, when I woke up with the iPhone 15, I didn’t recognize the house where I lived, or the room where I was sleeping, or the person beside me in the bed. Richard said, “I think you should get the wireless earpods. You’ll like them.” I said, “How do you know?” He laughed. The difference between learning a person and learning an iPhone is that, eventually, you learn the iPhone. You even forget the learning part. Once human beings know something, we think we’ve always known it—like the discovery of irony by a child, it’s a one-way door. Going back to 2007—it was Richard’s and my second Christmas together—and the way I got the catering job was the chef who usually cooked dinner for the Murphys got sick. Or maybe it was that the catering company I worked for had overbooked the chefs, and suddenly there weren’t e...

Henry Taylor, UNTITLED, 2010. From Untitled Portfolio , issue no. 243. © HENRY TAYLOR, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND HAUSER AND WIRTH. PHOTOGRAPHS BY MAKENZIE GOODMAN.  Book that made me cry on the subway: Stoner , John Williams Book that made me miss my subway stop: Prodigals , Greg Jackson Book I was embarrassed to read on the subway: The Shards , Bret Easton Ellis Book someone asked me about on the subway: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty Book I saw most often on the subway: Big Swiss , Jen Beagin —Camille Jacobson, engagement editor My reading this year was defined by fascinating but frustrating books. Reading to explore, reading for pleasure—sometimes the two don’t converge. In January and February, I battled against Marguerite Young’s thousand-plus-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling , reading a pdf of it on my computer (why did I do this? I honestly don’t know) and developing a (hopefully temporary) eye twitch in the process. Among other things, the novel is abou...

From Recent Vases, a portfolio by Francesca DiMattio in issue no. 228. This year I was so happy. I was happy for the main reason that I think people have been happy throughout human history, which is that I fell in love. At least that’s why stories tend to tell us that people are happy—happily ever after, and all that. When people asked how I was, I found myself saying, so happy, almost involuntarily, and then feeling a little ashamed, like maybe I was boring them. The thing is that other people’s happiness is often boring. All happy families are alike, and all that. I read a line in a short story in the recent Fall issue of The Paris Review , in fact: “ We were happy on the road, and happiness can’t be narrated. ” This felt true to me, and I also wanted to argue with it. Yet whenever I did, the terms seemed to slip away from me—what was happiness, anyway, and what did it mean to narrate it? And was I really so happy, when in fact lots of things in my life were going wrong, when ...