The summer I got engaged, I flew from San Francisco to London to see my mother. I had to remind myself during the flight that the engagement’s being a big deal didn’t make the trip a big deal, and that I should treat it like any other visit...
Melon Floyd was born out in the Salts, 1881, in the border country between Winnemucca and Susanville—before they recorded Black voices on acetate, before his knife-throwing contest with Charlie Long, before “Laughing Man Blues.” His father...
The house that the three men lived in looked like any old house in the neighborhood. No carvings on the door or around the roof. No lush garden out back, just a patch of green and barely even that. The windows had all been closed and the...
The metallic desks in the administrative offices of IIT-Delhi, India’s top-ranked engineering college, hadn’t been moved since 1976; nor had their bureaucratic occupants. This created in the office an atmosphere of geopolitical resignation...
And then they started fighting about what the gravestone would say. Noam’s dad wanted “Son, something, and friend, plucked in the prime of his life.” He didn’t know what the “something” would be yet, just that there had to be three things...
Sommy notices his legs first, hairy and stumpy, the part not covered by his tan-colored shorts. He’s standing by the airport’s exit, watching a woman on tiptoes, a piece of cardboard held above her head. His name is Bayo, Sommy’s new...
After a wretched, wakeful night, my hot head buzzing with annoyance, I sat squirming in my study waiting for Ollie to arrive. At nine he put his head in, smiling with his usual greeting, “How are we doing, Andy?”
It is strange, looking back, to think how different things could have been. Years ago, the company I work for undertook a number of joint ventures in China. We didn’t understand the place well, but the industry was in transition, and it was...
