His mother cupped her palm over the mouthpiece and aimed the black receiver at his chest. “Gino,” she said in a thin reedy whisper, “you talk to him and be civil.”
I like to think of Sammy and me as living the kind of life that everyone would live if he had the chance. Some people call us bums, some call us beachcombers, some people don’t call us anything: they just look, sigh, and say, enjoy it for...
On the first day I tell them: “When searching for the Seven Cities of Cibola, Coronado was so disappointed by what he found in the land that would one day become Kansas that he strangled the guide who’d brought him here and turned around.”
Master of the short story Charles Baxter has a new collection of linked stories, There’s Something I Want You to Do, out this February from Pantheon. Each of the ten stories is named for a virtue or a vice, and we’re proud to publish...
The mouse before me is dead, its body emptied of organs. Dead but still innervated, so still blinking in this world. I only harvest from their core—heart, lungs, liver, and the rest—but soon I will have to work with their brains.
