Albert Goldbarth

Because we’ve seen the power in even a single atom unchained from its own infrastructural hold, and know what happens when a mass—the famous “critical mass”—of atoms are simultaneously unformed (the woe of Nagasaki is unendurable both on th [...]

“Until the 1920s physicists viewed the vacuum much as the rest of us still do: as a true void. That all changed with the birth of quantum mechanics. According to that theory, [empty] space is seething with energy and particles that flit into and ou [...]

The real wing of a real angel . . . ? That would be the travel of light through the universe. Now imagine both wings . . . no, we can’t. Instead, medieval artists set them onto a figure’s shoulders, made a backpack, made [...]

  They tried to stop her dying. The son with the money tried—he shoveled it by the trainload into her lungs. The daughter made herself an expert in the illness, to erase it on its own terms: still it stayed, it grew, and as you know the eraser [...]

Sometimes the dominatrix simply squats above the subservient mouth, and feeds it like a mother bird. At other times (in other moods) a sense of courtly ritual is called for, and her seat-on-hollow-box is wheeled out, so something formal and geometric [...]

For his birthday, they bought their ten-year-old a pet boa constrictor."Feeding time" became a matter of knowingly kitschy ritual, with Marco Polo costumes and a gold gong (was a trash can lid). And then, from a level about a thousand miles above thi [...]

. . . and then woke—as I'd dwindled into it—with the pen still in my hand."Whatever getsya through the night . . . " a sometime-cokehead friend would say, and shake her snow-globe of a cranium, inside of which her devils for the day were be [...]

With the witch, and the batwinged monkeys, Kim thought Emmie would be nightmared-up for days. But Emmie's three and a half. She doesn't understand these stand for half of what's out there waiting. "Mommy this is all in Dorty's 'magination, right?" R [...]

Betsy Nelson of Arlington, Va. , sued Irving's Sports Store of nearby Falls Church after security personnel there falsely accused her of shoplifting a basketball. Nelson, 33, was nine months pregant. —as reported in National Lampoon's "True Fact [...]

It was my thirtieth year to heaven, Thomas wrote. Even that was last year. In the corner, the radio's crumbed-over from the cake, a final candle leans like a drunk. The country station clears its throat—I shave, then nick, my own. A long tim [...]

1. The the ladder slipped and Roger with it. "The skull," Cully emphasizes, "showed through." And before they wheeled him in to drain and stitch, he told her "Go home shit cover the roof before it rains." No shingle work for me, uh-uh. I don't want t [...]