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    English Made Easy: A Story from Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events
    English Made Easy: A Story from Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events
    English Made Easy: A Story from Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events
    Ebook29 pages24 minutes

    English Made Easy: A Story from Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events

    By Kevin Moffett

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    About this ebook

    "English Made Easy," a story from Kevin Moffett's dazzling new collection, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events, explores the persistence of grief in the life of a single mother and recent widow. Moffett's story is a moving meditation on how we process loss—both within ourselves and with those around us.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 31, 2012
    ISBN9780062233196
    English Made Easy: A Story from Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events
    Author

    Kevin Moffett

    Kevin Moffett's stories have appeared in McSweeney's, Tin House, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere, as well as in three editions of The Best American Short Stories. He is the winner of the Nelson Algren Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2010 National Magazine Award for the title story. He lives in Claremont, California.

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    • 4/5
      A collection of nine short stories -- “pedigreed” stories you might say, since eight of them were previously published in literary journals like McSweeney’s, Tin House, and Harvard Review, and two of those were selected for volumes of The Best American Short Stories series.They're quietly funny, mostly accessible but sometimes confounding, and often melancholy but in a comforting way that says we get through difficult times. I enjoyed the originality in premise or voice in most of the stories, especially the title story about a young writer, his writing mentor, and his father who in retirement "began writing trueish stories about fathers and sons"; and another that opens when an architecture student, on board a plane awaiting takeoff to Italy, receives a text that the terminally ill father he just visited has died ... the tension builds beautifully as he hesitates, deciding whether to go back or go on.I gave up on one (curiously, the only unpublished) story and skimmed another. But I’ll look for more by Kevin Moffett.(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)

    Book preview

    English Made Easy - Kevin Moffett

    English Made Easy

    A Story from Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events

    Kevin Moffett

    Contents

    Cover

    Title Page

    English Made Easy

    For More Stories from Kevin Moffett

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    English Made Easy

    Tonight the air is cooler but not yet cold, and the houses float together and separate like boats in a bay. Lena walks alone. She is not drunk. She’s had several glasses of wine, but wine doesn’t seem to affect her lately. Possibly her legs are drunk. Waiting to cross the street after talking to Bern from her support group, she repeats what she said to him and it sounds perfectly sensible, perfectly sober. She said: thank you.

    On Boylston, she sees old Mrs. Appleman in a yellow sweatshirt, pulling weeds. She waves Lena over to ask her name, where she lives, what her husband does for a living. Mrs. Appleman has some type of exquisitely benign dementia. She asks Lena these questions several times a week, amazed anew by each answer. Your husband’s overseas, you say?

    He spends winters in South America. Except it’s not winter there, it’s summer.

    Everything’s so big, Mrs. Appleman says. The world, my house. She kneads her hands together. The backs are chafed and intricately mottled. Which house are you again?

    Lena describes her house for Mrs. Appleman: gray with black trim, pair of jacaranda trees out front.

    I know that one, Mrs. Appleman says. She always says this. Didn’t a woman’s husband die? With a baby on the way?

    Lena listens to the hollow, bone-like tock of bamboo chimes nearby. It’s a mournful, an awful sound to broadcast through a neighborhood. I’ve heard that, too, she says.

    Does your husband ever put his hand on your back when you walk through a doorway? The old woman smiles and waits and, perhaps sensing Lena’s unease, says, You have such an amazed little expression. You look like you just found a lost race.

    Lena pauses

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