Eddie said to send the lobster first-class or whatever it took to get it to Wyoming alive and reasonably happy so they could boil it to death there. He made her smile, talking like that. She’d fallen in with him yesterday afternoon at the fundraiser, on probably the largest private lawn on Cape Cod. He…

Below the winding river road there are naked sunbathers clinging to naked milk-sucking babies, spotless rainbow of towels, neat corners, not a speck of sand because nudists are worried about getting grit out of all their sensitive cracks and crevices. There are women’s swollen breasts, their sun-oiled babies, the river’s vintage waves, its hollow curves.…

Jane wears her lucky bra, the one with white lace; I wear Roman Holiday Red lipstick, the color that makes boys look twice. We leave the hostel teetering on the cliff’s edge. The day is behind us: the ruins unearthed from ash, the looming double-humped volcano, the man on the train back to Naples rubbing…

The storm lasts three days, and by the end of it the mud is sliding under the patio door into the kitchen. Our baby, who has just learned to walk, slaps her feet through the mud on her way to the living room and you chase her, swatting at her diaper with a hand towel.…

My grandmother smelled like a mixture of lipstick, day-old perfume, cigarettes, casinos, and death. We sat around the Formica table in her kitchen in Brooklyn Heights, two glasses of orange juice between us. “He always came home, like a sunset,” she said. A cigarette dangling from her lips, her voice shook when she spoke. My…

At the Saturday farmer’s market on our town green I buy late lettuce and inhale the first smoky whiff of fall. My son is across the street going through boxes of used books at the library society’s paperback sale. Will’s fifteen now, tall and skinny, into horror and science fiction. I’m tempted by homespun knitting…

My sister Eileen always has to take things personally. Some might say she’s a narcissist. Like when that twelve-year-old girl got abducted in Salt Lake City some years ago, she went into a meltdown for days—trembling, crying, and ruining the third wedding of our other sister by staying outside in the car during the ceremony…

Alice inherited her family’s bungalow on Carter Lake after her father died. The man her parents bought the house from said the lake just appeared one rainy summer. But Alice doubted it. The lake never got any fuller, even after all the snow melted in the spring. Alice kept a pink inner tube tied to…

Margaret promised to give me dating advice because I was newly alone and shook like a frond every time I imagined starting from the beginning. For crying out loud, Margaret said, stop plucking your eyebrows off. I shut the little compact shaped like a kitten. Sorry, I said, I just want my face to look…

The Springer Spaniel stood in the middle of an empty residential street, a leash trailing behind it on the asphalt. Cate wondered if she was imagining things. But the dog was real, as real as the figure lying nearby in the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the road, hands on her chest, looking…

While “viciously skewering the politics of rebellion,” Lavinia Ludlow’s 2011 debut novel alt.punk offers some of the richest description to be found in the indie lit scene, and her pointed follow-up, Single Stroke Seven, opens with the possibility that much more than words are to be sliced and diced in Ludlow’s world. The California writer and musician has…

When I was twenty-five and Strane was fifty-five, we started talking about dying. That was the year he was diagnosed and, grayed and gaunt, he began to ask me things like: “how will you remember me?” and “are you at all angry with me because if you are I’d like to try to make amends”…