Fiction

Revision

Thirty years ago, when she was first here with her husband and two young children, they’d come in the summer—June—so that Otto could teach a study abroad course, and the city then was a lush racket of color. The pale blue and pink and gold ornamental bric-a-brac of Belle Époque architecture. Stoops cluttered with terra cotta pots spilling herbs. Window box gardens bursting geraniums the startling florescent red of she-didn’t-know- what. It was all exactly as she’d envisioned Paris since she’d first wanted to go as a sixteen-year-old sitting in a high school French class.

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La Dolce Vita

The camp took place in the bucolic township of Yongpyong, a three-hour bus ride east of Seoul. Twenty professors from top conservatories convened at Alpine Valley Hotel with their flocks of protégés numbering about a hundred in all, predominantly girls. Over the next two weeks, we were to learn from the venerated masters and perform in the concerts held every other evening in the hotel’s grand banquet hall.

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The Woman Who Knew Judo

I used to sit in the kitchen and draw when Jean visited my mother. I loved to show my completed drawings to Jean. She made me feel as if I’d discovered an elemental truth, or shown her something vital. Once, when I handed her a picture I’d done of a yellow lion with spindly legs and huge round eyes, she looked at it with consideration and said, “You know, it doesn’t look like a real lion. But I think you’ve caught the spirit of a lion here, and that’s a lot more important. This lion has lion-ness.”

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Vagaries

Vu Tran’s story, “Vagaries,” first appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review’s Fall 2004 issue. The girl, when Chau first sees her, looks restless. She sits in the restaurant’s crowded patio under a table umbrella that shades her from the bright noon sun. One arm remains in an intrusive spot of sunlight and looks severed from the

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The King of Hispaniola

  Chidelia Edochie’s story, “The King of Hispaniola,” first appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review‘s Winter 2012 issue. I spent that Christmas Eve with my schoolmate Bibi and her parents at the National Palace, comparing the sizes of presents and our thirteen-year-old breasts with the other daughters of cabinet members and businessmen. All over Port-au-Prince younger

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Sakeen

Sakeen the housemaid was rarely free to play with us, even at parties. She had to prepare dinner, serve it to the guests, and clean up. Shahnaz, my uncle’s wife, liked to throw big parties to outplay our mothers in a game between them known as “The Best Hostess.” Her dinner table was always colorful

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Second Slice of Darkness

Why I Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review Fiction Reader Elinam Agbo introduces Hossein Mortezaeian Abkenar’s story “Second Slice of Darkness,” from our Spring 2019 Issue: Iran.  So often, we want stories to immediately declare their secrets. We are as impatient in reading as we are in listening. In “Second Slice of Darkness,” Mehri awaits her

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Ayatollahland

Why I Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review Fiction Reader Elinam Agbo introduces Dena Afrasiabi’s story “Ayatollahland,” from our Spring 2019 Issue: Iran.  Welcome to Ayatollahland, an Iran-inspired theme park in Houston, Texas, or as Dena Afrasiabi’s narrator puts it: “a place for the wistful, disconnected members of my parents’ generation to relive their pre-revolution days.”

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