1. There is a photograph of my home in Karachi. If you look carefully, you can see me waving from the second story window, my three brothers playing cricket in the street below. In the photograph I am wearing a white dress. I am about eight years old. Both of my parents are sitting on …
All over town the euonymus is as red as you’ve ever seen it, bright bushes of flame dotting the landscape. You think of blood but also tell yourself to look up that passage in the Bible about Moses and the bush. Everyone says it is a gorgeous autumn, more vivid than it has been in …
The botanist made a lot of money breeding soybeans that would grow in dust. He didn’t care much for the money and had no interest in knowing how much of it he had. He lived in a cheap motel and wore clothes from second-hand stores. His advancement in soybean horticulture came through a combination of …
Episode One It opens on a summer day outside a coal-burning power plant on the coast of Lake Erie. 2016. Nick, about forty, is dressed in a blue Oxford shirt and khaki slacks—the uniform of the mild-mannered, prestige TV protagonist. His wife, Sabrina, thirty-five, is dressed in a blue t-shirt that reads “Save Yourself” across …
I created the Wikipedia entry for Daniel M. Sherenton as a joke. It would be months before I realized the full, unhappy consequences of this decision. I was scheduled to visit my family in the northern suburb of Detroit where I’m from, and I had planned to boast, at some point during the trip, that …
I tell Algo nice try, but Anthony Keidis is all wrong. Yeah, RHCP is the right decade, but Kiedis’s voice is too blue spotlight, too broad strokes, straight petting, warm corner of the swimming pool. His voice is a tongue pressing too hard in a spot where I need soft, erratic pressure. To be fair, …
In Alma and Manda’s trim white farmhouse, it was a wonder the border of Swedish Christmas plates didn’t fly off the walls as Manda stormed through the preparation of their afternoon coffee. Alma sat at the kitchen table, oblivious to her sister clattering the flowered cups and saucers. Her mind was so occupied, it didn’t …
‘End up with’ sounds so ridiculous when I’m talking to myself. But in some ways the person you decide to settle down with—that sounds ridiculous too. Let’s try again. But in some ways, getting to the person you decide to navigate the world next to is like a roll of the dice with a trick …
I had always hated Mila’s boyfriend, but because she loved him and because she was dying, I tried to be polite. When he called, it was one in the morning Pacific Time and I’d already been asleep for hours. He said, “Mila’s asking, do you have any bud?” as if we were twenty and I …
In my most vivid memory of my daughter, we are on the beach in Kauai and she is walking toward me, hair wet and tangled, legs pink with sunburn. Her purple bathing suit is too small for her. She extends her cupped hands toward me. “Daddy, look,” she says, opening her fingers. There in her …