“What begins as a glance extends into lingering contemplation. She is going through my passport page by page, as if reading a novel. Then she turns to the computer for some corresponding information and back again. Her eyes have lit up. My first reaction is pride, that she likes it, but then I remember that […]
“It was as if there was a roulette wheel turning, not with numbers, but with destinations that had evocative names: Sofia, Odessa, Bangkok, Istanbul. He had been watching the wheel spin, waiting to see where the ball would finally land. He would be happy to go to any of these faraway places and so assumed […]
The latest issue of Drunken Boat is out, including my short story “Literary Theft” – a story about, among other things – a literary theft, St. Petersburg and a nefarious urban legend. “Literary theft!” Ivan cried, suddenly going into some kind of rapture. “You stole that from my poem!”—Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov Read the story […]
Adam and Eve by Michael Stein It began as the obscure idea of a German philosopher, that our bodies are nothing more than the physical manifestation of our wills, and that our fingers can find their way on a keyboard, tie knots and make obscene gestures because those are things we probably wanted to be […]
Persephone is making her yearly ascent, trudging up the tunnel which leads from the underworld to the surface of the earth. A pinpoint of light guides her way, a distant star which gradually becomes a sun, before finally enveloping her in the blinding haze of daylight. As always, her mother is there waiting, although without […]
Potemkin had built his legendary villages to be viewed from a distance as the Empress passed by in her carriage. They were meant to be merely glanced at, for effect, like a neon sign or a fashion model, and were created accordingly. But what if the Empress decides to leave the designated path, what if […]
A Fairy Tale (part 2) by Michael Stein read part one The storyteller, meanwhile, is already far, far away, racing through time and leaving the past behind him, as the cliche wisely tells us to do. “Good riddance,” he says to himself smugly, if in fact it is well and truly gone. For his trained […]
A Fairy Tale (part 1) by Michael Stein Is it possible to have lived in a time so far back, so ancient, that fairy tales would be science fiction and Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella too futuristic to be believed ? Imagine the situation: a storyteller goes among the nomadic peoples for whom we almost never […]
In one version of the story of Samson, although still shorn of his locks and God-given strength, he is able to elude his Philistine captors. Delilah’s perfidy proves only half successful, leaving our hero with a dilemma that the original version neatly does away with. Unable to fight, let alone subdue lions with his bare […]
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