New England Review

Jay Parini

A Beer with Borges

New nonfiction from NER 39.1

I can smell Borges in my dreams, and I dream about him often. He reeks of age, with the mustiness, the sourness of years. And the odor gives off a peculiar sweetness, too, as if he has smoked ripe old tobacco in a pipe for many decades, although I suspect he didn’t.

“View of the Riviera” by Chuka Susan Chesney, courtesy of the Aarnun Gallery.

A writer of poems and brief, enigmatic stories, and provocative essays that were also stories, Borges moved easily between fact and fiction, and his wild inventions became truths. It was all fiction for him, as in the title of his most celebrated volume, Ficciones, first published in the early forties. Fiction means, in its Latin root-word, “shaping.” And Borges was always shaping realities, even making them.

I called him Mr. Borges the first time we met, and he corrected me. “Just Borges, please.”


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from NER 39.1
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Joseph Pearson

This Is Also Tangier

“in your arms, in your arms” by John Gregory Brown

You come from the other side?” a young man later asks me, in the bar in Tangier.

♦

On the flight from Lisbon to Morocco, I try to see where Europe ends and Africa begins. The coast must be somewhere below me, but it’s lost in the diffusion of clouds. I stare at the cabin wall opposite, where strange shapes, long trapezoids, morph; they’re projected from the late sun blazing to the south. I want to say “African sun,” but that rings false, like something said in the nineteenth century.

 

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Joseph Pearson is a writer and historian based in Berlin, and author of Berlin, his portrait of the German capital (Reaktion Press, 2018). Pearson is the essayist of the Schaubühne Theatre in Berlin, and also writes for the BBC and Newsweek.

New Nonfiction from NER 38.4

Post-its by Evan Lavender-Smith

Living Room by Chuka Susan Chesney

He reads in the ugly brown reclining chair with the quilt tucked in around his half-naked body. He reads a chapter book, a designation we use to refer to a book that doesn’t contain pictures and isn’t a movie or TV tie-in, a book with discrete chapters and a sustained narrative account. He reads for a half hour. I set the kitchen timer. We’re forcing him to read for this length of time, but it’s a different kind of forcing than when we force him to do his chores or when we force him to eat all the food on his plate—he enjoys being forced to read. The kitchen timer beeps. I walk down the hall to the study, tell him that although the half hour is up, he’s free to continue reading if he likes. He says he would prefer to stop. But he can’t find his bookmark, he says, the Post-it Note he affixes above the last sentence he’s read so he’ll know exactly where to pick up tomorrow night, so he won’t accidentally reread a sentence he’s already read. I tear a Post-it from the pad and hand it to him. He evaluates his progress: page 122, only 55 more to go. I ask him how it’s going. He says it’s going fine. Better than some, he says, not as good as others. He stands, asks me to please get out of the way because his TV show is starting and he needs to get across the house to the living room. I stand with my back pressed against the doorframe and watch as he canters down the hall.

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Evan Lavender-Smith is the author of From Old Notebooks (Blaze Vox, 2010). His writing has recently been published in BOMB, Hobart, and Southern Review. He is the founding editor of Noemi Press and an assistant professor in the MFA program at Virginia Tech.

 

New Nonfiction from NER 38.4

A Miniature for My Mother by Julia Ridley Smith

Leonard Kogan

Aside from a few patches of white where the color has scratched off, the brooch is in good condition—a tiny painting on ivory, set in a gold mount. No jewels. It has been well cared for. The image is of a young man in black clothes leaning against a pedestal topped with an urn. Hair-thin lines make up his cravat, his face, the blades of grass at his feet, and the serifs of the pedestal’s inscription: Sacred be thy memory. He leans on his right elbow, his head resting on his hand; his left arm hangs by his side, holding an open book. Over the tomb, there’s a hint of tree branches, behind them blue sky. Around the edge of the pin, there are gold letters: Rebecca Wilkinson * nat * 7 May 1771 * OB: 23 JAN * 1793.

January 23—that’s my mother’s birthday, and the pin belonged to her. What was a sad day for young Rebecca’s family in 1793 was presumably a happy one for my grandparents in 1942. My mother, named Margaret Ridley after her mother and called “Ridley,” was their first child, born premature and apparently not pretty, both facts my grandmother would mention in a letter she wrote to her in-laws shortly after the birth. In this letter, she instructs them not to make excuses to people about why she’s had a baby in January when she was only just married in June. They are not to tell anybody she fell off a ladder or slipped in the tub. My grandmother knows the truth—her baby was born early—and, anyway, it’s nobody’s business. I doubt anybody said a word. She was only twenty-four, but people already knew better than to mess with her.

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Julia Ridley Smith’s stories and essays have appeared in American Literary Review, Arts and Letters, Carolina Quarterly, Chelsea, Greensboro Review, Southern Cultures, and storySouth, among others; new fiction is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review. An associate editor at Bull City Press, she teaches fiction writing at UNC Greensboro.

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