Mr. Pastern was far from dead

"Twenty years ago, she would have been known as a golf widow, and the sum of her manner was perhaps one of bereavement. She usually wore weeds, and a stranger watching her board a train might have guessed that Mr. Pastern was dead, but Mr. Pastern was far from dead. He was marching up and down the locker room of the Grassy Brae Golf Club shouting, 'Bomb Cuba! Bomb Berlin! Let's throw a little nuclear hardware at them and show them who's boss.' He was brigadier of the club's locker-room light infantry, and at one time or another declared war on Russia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and China."

~~ from "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow" in The Stories of John Cheever

chronicled in scuffed baseboards

"All my dealings are with [rental] agents, and I have never known the people from whom we have rented, but their ability to leave behind them a sense of physical and emotional presences is amazing. Our affairs are certainly not written in air and water, but they do seem to be chronicled in scuffed baseboards, odors, and tastes in furniture and paintings, and the climates we step into in these rented places are as marked as changes of weather on the beach. Sometimes there is a long hallway of benignness, a purity and clearness of feeling to which we all respond. Someone was enormously happy here, and we rent their happiness as we rent their beach and catboat."

~~ from "The Seaside Houses" in The Stories of John Cheever

Scout

PS: L.U.S.K. failed to mention that "Scout" by Alex Kudera appears in Loser II, a print collection of poetry and prose delivered by Mai Gooch and Conor Hultman.

Loser II in blue

Mai Bell and Conor Hultman's Loser II is about and out (and only $12).

Loser at an angle

Behold Loser I.

 

"Eating Fried Chicken" live June 26, 2026

As part of a June 26 nine-minute video, Linh Dinh reads his classic "Eating Fried Chicken." The text of the poem can be found here.

Loser I is on the scene (and a print NYRB).

Read A.P. Balthazar, Alex "Kuder" Kudera, Alexandra Naughton, and Emily K. Sipiora in Mai Bell and Conor Hultman's Loser I.

 

the Lermontov medal

"It was an old, small, poor country church. The angel was in a chapel on the left, which the priest lighted. The image, buried in jewelry, stood in an iron cage with a padlocked door. The priest opened this and Bascomb placed his Lermontov medal at the angel's feet. Then he got to his knees and said loudly: 'God bless Walt Whitman. God bless Hart Crane. God bless Dylan Thomas. God bless William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, and especially Ernest Hemingway.' The priest locked up the sacred relic and they left the church together."

~~ from "The World of Apples" in The Stories of John Cheever

The World of Apples

"Of the four poets with whom Bascomb was customarily grouped one had shot himself, one had drowned himself, one had hanged himself, and one had died of delirium tremens. Bascomb had known them all, loved most of them, and had nursed two of them when they were ill, but the broad implication that he had, by choosing to write poetry, chosen to destroy himself was something he rebelled against vigorously."

~~ from "The World of Apples" in The Stories of John Cheever

this past week's reading

From the June 2026 print a Harper's Magazine, articles I've read include "Tales of Trash: Memoirs of a Garbageman" as well as Kevin Lozano's "Strangers on a Train: The City that Bernie Goetz Made." I've also read Michael Gorra's "Call My Agent" in the June 25 New York Review of Books, several articles from the June 15 print Christian Science Monitor, and the first two short stories from Richard Ford's Sorry for Your Trouble.

Eclectica Magazine's 30th Anniversary

"A Thanksgiving" or "Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served" will be included in Eclectica Magazine's print anthology of best fiction celebrating thirty years of publishing online. Tom Dooley's magazine will publish a similar anthology of poetry.

The Waiter

"The Waiter" by Alex Kudera appears in Loser I, a print collection of poetry and prose delivered by Mai Bell and Conor Hultman.

One man's home is another man's Florida.

From Tyler Dempsey's interview with Kyle Minor, I learn that Kyle was raised not far from where "My Father's Great Recession" takes place. Around minute 17 of Kyle's interview, Ohio State and Donald Ray Pollock get a mention.

current reads

I finished So Far Gone by Jess Walter, and I've read a couple short stories from his collection The Angel of Rome. (The longer titular story has the feel of a novella and is quite good.) I've also read the first few pages of a couple novels: Amreekiya by Lena Mahmoud and The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh. But last night, I read Peter Hessler, Joseph O'Neill, and Becca Rothfeld on "Love and Death in the American Novel" from the June 8 print issue of The New Yorker.

Prep Time @ Citywide Lunch

“I wanted to write in a manner that was honest, yet, the word in my mind was, kind. It took me multiple drafts for each e-mail. I don’t know that any of those e-mails was either. I was a week past the deadline when I was done. I’d had to unpack a few items of clothing so I wouldn’t have to deal with my own odour. I’d also had to go out and buy groceries for another week, which I’ll admit: multiple times I’d had to hold back a loud, throat-jabbing sob that day: guilt about using a portion of all the cash I’d left for Mom and Dad, this chest-binding sadness I’d felt when I saw a father hoisting his frilly-frocked daughter up so she could pick out her choice of fruit juice, the cashier’s pitted nails, the fruit man calling out to me. . .”

~~ from “Prep Time” by S. Taufeequddin Azher

a rebel in defense of the sinking of a stadium tradition

Consider A Rebel in Defense of Tradition or Harry Mathews's The Sinking of Odradek Stadium.

you can't keep your family safe

"Kinnick had forgotten the hardest part of parenting: the realization that you can't keep your family safe. That no matter how strong you were, or how much money you had, you could never totally shield the people you loved from the sorrows of life. Or shield yourself, for that matter."

~~ from So Far Gone by Jess Walter