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Birds in FallA Novel
The cabin rattled. The bulkheads shook. The overhead bins popped open. Bags, briefcases, satchels rained down. The cellist clenched her eyes. I felt her fingers tightened on mine—but it was Ana I felt beside me.
We broke cloud cover and dropped into a pool of dark. The bones around my cheeks pressed into my skull. I saw the sheet music flattened like a stamp on the ceiling. The metamorphoses. I couldn’t tell which way was up and which was down and out the window a green light stood on the top of the world, a lighthouse spun above us, a brief flame somewhere in the night.
Birds in Fall : A Novel -
Birds in FallA Novel
The woman couldn’t say when they were likely to arrive. Two days, three days, perhaps more. Everything depended upon the search and rescue—and if any of the 242 passengers could indeed be found—and whether their surviving family members actually wanted to make the trip to Trachis. Of course, she said, the airline would fully compensate the inn. Most people probably wouldn’t come, she speculated. But the island was the nearest landfall to the crash, and some no doubt would want to travel there—“for closure,” she added.
Birds in Fall : A Novel -
Birds in FallA Novel
During World War II high-flying pilots over the Atlantic often puzzled over phantom specks that showed up on their radar screens. “Radar angels,” they dubbed them and wondered at the faint apparitions, only to learn years later that they were actually birds migrating over open water. Birds, like humans, are mostly moisture—they’re ninety percent water—and a flock of finches on a radar screen shows up like a small weather system: one or two green dots. On a night of heavy migration in autumn or spring, a radar screen blossoms with fleeting spectral dots.
Birds in Fall : A Novel
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Brief Encounters with Che GuevaraStoriesFrom"Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera"
When Blair protested they hit him fairly hard in the stomach, and that was the moment he knew that his life had changed. They called him la merca, the merchandise, and for the next four days he slogged through the mountains eating cold arepas and sardines and taking endless taunts about firing squads, although he did, thanks to an eighty-mile-a-week running habit, hold up better than the oil executives and mining engineers the rebels were used to bringing in.
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara : Stories -
Brief Encounters with Che GuevaraStoriesFrom"Bouki and the Cocaine"
“I want you to tell me about the cocaine,” said Michelet.
“Of course, m’sieu le chef. Which cocaine, please?”
Michelet’s teeth did a slow, decalcifying grind. For all his power he looked whipped sitting there in his truck, like a man in serious trouble with his wife. “We heard that a load of contraband was dropped at Cayes Caiman last week. On Thursday. And you were seen there on Thursday.”
“Yeah? Hmmm, I don’t know, m’sieu le chef. Cayes Caiman, yeah, sure, I go there sometimes, it’s a good place for sirik and chadwon. But you know I’m not so good with days. Thursday, you said?”
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara : Stories -
Brief Encounters with Che GuevaraStoriesFrom"Fantasy for Eleven Fingers"
The effect on audiences was astonishing. From the first reported performance, in October 1831, there were accounts of seizures, faintings, and fits of epilepsy among the spectators; though some accused Visser of paying actors to mimic and encourage such convulsions, the phenomenon appears to have been accepted as genuine. Mass motor hysteria would most likely be the diagnosis today, though a physician from Gossl who witnessed one performance proposed theories having to do with electrical contagion; others linked the Fantasy to the Sistine Chapel Syndrome, the hysterics to which certain foreign women—English spinsters, chiefly—sometimes fall prey while viewing the artistic treasures of Italy.
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara : Stories
Selected Works
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The WildingA Novel
“You see my grandson over there.” Justin’s father humps his chin in Graham’s direction without taking his eyes off Seth. “You don’t want him to see what the inside of your skull looks like, do you?”
“You’d never do that,” Seth says. “I could walk right up to that rifle and stick my finger in it and you’d never do a thing.”
“Come on and try.”
“You’re so full of it.”
Then his father swings the barrel left and fires. The crack of the gunshot is followed by the chime of glass shattering, falling from the red pickup, its left headlight destroyed.
For a moment Seth stares at his truck. “You’ll fucking pay for that,” he says.
The Wilding : A Novel -
The WildingA Novel
Justin watches him in silence. There is something in his son’s face. A tightening of his jaw and a flaring of his nostrils that foretells what will come. He isn’t going to ask permission. He is going to shoot. It makes him seem faraway and unfamiliar. He is so enchanted by the desire to kill—the same acute and forceful feeling that drove primitive man to bring a blade of obsidian to a stick and sharpen it—that his current life, his school and his bicycle and his bedroom with the desk scored from the snarl of his pencil and the giant beer mug filled with brown pennies and the movie-monster posters hanging on the wall, has become nothing but a tiny black fly he brushes aside with his hand before bringing it to the stock and tightening his finger around the trigger.
The Wilding : A Novel -
The WildingA Novel
Justin waits for him to say something more and soon he does, when walking about the campsite, kicking through its remains. “Bears don’t unscrew a jar of peanut butter. They don’t unpeel a stick of jerky. Bears don’t drink a Pabst Blue Ribbon and neither do I.” He peers around the cooler and knocks closed its lid. “And bears don’t steal whiskey.”
The Wilding : A Novel
Selected Works
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The Faith Healer of Olive AvenueStoriesFrom"The Heart Finds Its Own Conclusion"
“He has something of mine,” the man said.
With that, she turned to look at him. “Who are you?” she finally demanded. “Sergio called me to come pick him up, not you.”
“You don’t know me?” His voice pitched higher, edging toward frustration, maybe anger. “You don’t know who I am?”
“No,” she finally said. “I don’t.”
“He’s got my heart,” the man said, melodramatically holding his hands across his chest, but he sneered a bit when he said it. “He’s got a lot of things I want back.”
Copyright © 2006 by Manuel Muñoz. By permission of Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists, New York, NY and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. All rights reserved. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express permission is prohibited.
The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue : Stories -
The Faith Healer of Olive AvenueStoriesFrom"Señor X"
I’m lucky: I spent only a year in jail in Avenal, for forgery, paychecks I faked a long time ago. The police were searching for something to charge me with when I got caught in Las Vegas, and all they came up with were those bad checks. I was in Las Vegas, heading east, as far away as I could get from the gas station that I helped rob with this guy I used to know, Kyle, the only white boy on Gold Street. To this day, I don’t know what happened to Kyle.
Copyright © 2006 by Manuel Muñoz. By permission of Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists, New York, NY and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. All rights reserved. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express permission is prohibited.
The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue : Stories -
The Faith Healer of Olive AvenueStoriesFrom"The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue"
After she counted the money, the woman folded up the bills and reached deep into the black T-shirt to hide the bills in her bra, and then she walked back out to the car. “You rub that crema on you every night, you hear me?” she ordered, and put her hands on Emilio again, as if to feel once more whatever she might have felt before. “Someone put the evil eye on you,” she told him as her hands traveled up the back of his neck and into the fringes of hair on the back of his head, rubbing him as a lover might, looking away from him in concentration, eyes closed. “You have to believe in it for it to go away.”
Copyright © 2006 by Manuel Muñoz. By permission of Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists, New York, NY and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. All rights reserved. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express permission is prohibited.
The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue : Stories
Selected Works
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The Age of OrphansA Novel
In these short distances and insufferable spans the boy lives through a night forgotten by history, where the men of the land and soldiers of the shah take to each other with bullet, knife, curse and bludgeon to craft a single composition; the precise choreography of flesh puppets, strung to a thousand stars and pulled as sparring lovers, to and from the flame, to and from the gouge, to and from the stab and shot, their beating hearts like magnets charged to the opposite pulls of victory and death.
The Age of Orphans : A Novel -
The Age of OrphansA Novel
…they tear down our lines of laundry and wear our socks over their hands and our sisters’ skirts like scarves around their necks; they smell our mothers’ stained monthly cloths and let their eyelids flutter in pretend delight. They kick over the pans of crushed tomatoes we have peeled and seeded and cooked for the winter to come, hours of work that leave our hands gummy and raw, and they make a contest of kicks—who kicks the farthest—and the pans fly through the air and splash our winter’s tomato sauce all over the street like blood.
The Age of Orphans : A Novel -
The Age of OrphansA Novel
I have a blind eye and it has brought me nothing but misery my whole life. It spews pus and tears all the time and when the shah soldier took one look at it he spat in my face and then moved me to the side with the tip of his gun, and I could see, with my one good eye, all the imperfects around the square relax.
The Age of Orphans : A Novel
Selected Works
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FieldworkA Novel
Everyone in anthro knows it, it’s an open secret, but coming home from the field is as tough as going out. Maybe even tougher. When you go out on the road, you’re you; and when you come back, you’re not you anymore, but they’re still them.
Fieldwork : A Novel -
FieldworkA Novel
She wrote exuberantly of the beauty of Thailand: the flooded lime-green rice paddies bordered by swaying palms; coconuts, mangoes, and durian for sale by the side of the road; the ornate temples with flashing mirrored roofs; wandering Buddhist monks with shaved heads in saffron robes; the cut galangal in bushels drying in the midday sun, the humid air earthy, like a root; and the sleepy, sweating water buffalo reluctantly plowing the fields.
Fieldwork : A Novel -
FieldworkA Novel
Four children and thirty years of frontier living, hauling buckets of water, riding on muleback, nights outdoors, and long windy days had robbed her of her beauty. Her hair had turned a steel gray, and for convenience she now cut it herself with her old shears, barely even bothering with a mirror just so long as it was out of here eyes and off her neck – this, the woman who in her youth had ordered by mail from Chicago a book entitled One Hundred Hair Arrangements for the Modern Lady.
Fieldwork : A Novel
Selected Works
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Las Vegas NoirFrom"This Or Any Desert"
Six months ago, before all this, I drove into Las Vegas on a hot August twilight. My first time in the city. From the highway, I could see the Strip in the far distance, but also a lone dark cloud above it, flushed on a bed of light, glowing alien and purplish in the sky. My tired, pulpy brain at the time, I thought it was a UFO or something and nearly hit the truck ahead of me. Fifteen minutes later, at a gas station, I was told about the beam of light from atop that pyramid casino and how you can even see the beam from space, given no clouds were in the way. My disappointment surprised me.
Las Vegas Noir -
Las Vegas NoirFrom"This Or Any Desert"
She glared at me, and then she started with something she’d been doing for the last few years every time we argued: She began speaking in Vietnamese. Not loudly or irrationally like she was venting her anger at me, but calmly and deliberately, as if I actually understood her, as if she was daring me to understand her, flaunting all the nasty things she could be saying to me and knowing full well that it could have been fucking gibberish for all I knew and that I could do nothing of the sort to her. I usually just ignored her or walked away. But this time, after a minute of staring her down as she delivered whatever the hell she was saying, I backhanded her across the face as hard as I could. It shut her up, sent her bumping into a dining chair.
Las Vegas Noir -
Las Vegas NoirFrom"This Or Any Desert"
He bent down, speaking closer now to my ear.
“What made you think she ever belonged to you, or more importantly, that you ever belonged with her? America, Mr. Robert, is not the melting pot you Americans like to say or think it is. Things get stirred, yes, but like oil and vinegar they eventually separate and settle and the like things always go back to each other. They have made new friends, perhaps even fucked them, but in their heart they will always wander back to where they belong. Love has absolutely nothing to do with it.”
Las Vegas Noir
Selected Works
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The EndA Novel
At times you could not fully expand your chest to take in breath, such was the push of the bodies on your body. And the kids in the trees throwing spiny sweet-gum monkey balls at your head. There were moments you felt you might be crushed. It had happened, in 1947. A Slovak woman and her babe in arms were crushed right here. Imagine killing somebody with your chest, a pair of hot corpses borne along by the pressing of your body and other people’s bodies—and still you came, out of this instinct to cram into the streets, because the body, despite reason, insisted on satisfying an urge that nothing in your brittle, private, homebound individual interior could satisfy.
The End : A Novel -
The EndA Novel
The woman’s blood is under his fingernails. Before he left, he washed his hands in her kitchen sink, then dried them, then washed them again. He washed the water glass he’d used. He left it to dry on the dish rack and went back into the parlor, where the woman lay on the floor. He introduced himself again, it was at least the third time, and asked again what her name was, but again she didn’t respond, or even stir, half-naked there under the coffee table. He couldn’t find a nailbrush, so there is still some blood under his fingernails. He tries not to look at the blood under his fingernails. He resists the temptation to smell them.
The End : A Novel -
The EndA Novel
The cigarette machine came smashing face-first to the floor. The man stood cursing it. The problem seemed to be penetrating his mind that, even if he’d succeeded in breaking the glass of the face, the cigarettes were now safely entombed under the shell of the machine unless he could lift it back up again. He collapsed onto his knees and began scratching at the sheet metal. It was piteous and difficult both to watch and not to watch, Ciccio saw he was alone with this man, in the depot.
The End : A Novel
Selected Works
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Miles from NowhereA Novel
Time moved both fast and slow, and neither speed synced up with her fears as she stood at the head of the line. The tellers looked too chipper for a Monday morning. Did they even have money on Mondays? she wondered. Shouldn’t she have come on a Friday? She couldn’t remember why she opened the stickup note, just that she did, and that her boyfriend, the first and only boy she’d ever dated, was the one who had penned it: This is a stickup. Give me all your monie.
The misspelling stopped her.
“Next in line,” a teller called.
Knowledge herself had quit school in the ninth grade but she couldn’t believe that he had misspelled money. “What kind of an idiot can’t spell money?” she told me. “How fucking stupid do you have to be? And if he’s that stupid, how stupid am I for robbing a bank for him?”
Miles from Nowhere : A Novel -
Miles from NowhereA Novel
At night I used to ride the ferry back and forth, from the city to Staten Island. I’d watch the diamond lights smearing the wet window glass or stand out on the windy deck as the regulars sat crooked, drinking their pints and shouting about different kids of loss. The engine shook my legs. The water pricked my skin. I stood on the railing and let the wind sting my eyes and tickle my veins where a warm drug bubbled through, heating up like the wires of an electric blanket. I was sixteen and pregnant then, thinking that the ups and downs of the East River would kill it somehow.
Miles from Nowhere : A Novel -
Miles from NowhereA Novel
That night I went home and put a grocery bag over my head. I wanted to see what the head felt like, separate from my body. I cinched the bag right around my neck and lay down without letting go of my grip. With my every breath the white plastic bag crinkled in and out, making too much noise, and the bare bulb hanging above me seemed foggy. My face turned damp. My breath smelled exactly like what I’d eaten for lunch—a bowl of instant noodles, a pickle. I tightened the grip on the bag, and eventually my breathing slowed, enough for me to sense a layer of mist licking my eyes. The plastic barely crinkled. Slowly my head began disremembering the body, sighing it off gently, until all I could feel was my now-giant skull and my own arm, still strangling the bag. It was quiet. And then too quiet.
Miles from Nowhere : A Novel
Selected Works
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Parasites Like UsA Novel
The van’s front windows were slathered with blood, and inside, a whole brood of furry lapdogs were going wild. They leapt over the captain’s chair, running along the dash and gauges, and the dogs were soaked in blood, their fur syrup-streaked, their whiskers drooping with it. One lapdog was desperately pawing red streaks on the glass, so that the driver’s window was greasy with a thick, dirty paste.
Parasites Like Us : A Novel -
Parasites Like UsA Novel
The GTO began to go down. A surge of water washed out of the hole in all directions, an ankle-deep wave that turned the frosted ice clear black. Only as the water soaked my boots, making them seem perched atop a sheet of smoked glass, did I realize that something else had happened, that, as the black of a hot rod slipped into the abyss of the lake, my Corvette had started to baby-crawl backward toward the hole.
Parasites Like Us : A Novel -
Parasites Like UsA Novel
They handed me receipts for all my property, and then I was placed in a white room that had once been part of the vast kitchen—still visible in the floor were marks where the old industrial freezers had been bolted down. Here I was forced to watch an orientation video. Following that, I had my head and nethers shaved, and was ordered to drink a chalky liquid, then made to urinate into a paper cup. Next, I was briefly violated, and before the rubber gloves even popped off, without so much as a glass of orange juice to calm my nerves, I was dusted with a delousing powder that tasted, in my nose and mouth, bitter as vitamin C.
Parasites Like Us : A Novel