Jacob Silverman

Sunday Saddam

Today Vol. 1 Brooklyn published my short story, “Being a Dictator Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.” 

photo by dagnyg

My short story, “Clearing,” was published today in Spork Press. It’s about a town slowly disappearing.

My ex-husband, Michael, was one of the first to go. He visited in early March. I wished him well — we had been on good terms for some time, but actually, we had never quite been on bad terms, and maybe that was the problem: we could never get excited enough to argue or, even briefly, to hate each other.

He had sold most of his things, and the rest lay in boxes in the bed of his truck, which looked as if packed for a delivery: well arranged and closely grouped cardboard cubes, with blue vinyl straps arcing across to keep them, like a mental patient, bound to the bed. I knew he had money problems, that a man had come by and made a decent offer on his house. Michael was wearing one of his work shirts, a stretched piece of fabric marked by a kaleidoscope of paint spatters and a few holes revealing tanned skin. Periodically he rubbed one hand across another, kneaded it — an old gesture, part of the body’s autonomous self. His hands still looked thick and dry, the knuckle-skin scraped down.

Read the rest here.

Fiction at Storychord

My short story, “Rose Garden,” was chosen for the latest issue of Storychord. This is doubly exciting for me, as I’m a fan of Storychord (which twice a month publishes a story, an image, and a one-song soundtrack by “underexposed talent”) and because “Rose Garden” is my first published story. Here’s a sample:

Walking to my car, parked at the curb, I see something in the street. Moving closer, it becomes a squirrel, gently laid out in the road, its fur a faint tortoiseshell pattern and appearing varnished in the afternoon light. Around its head is a puddle of rich pink blood, like melted lipstick, and the squirrel’s small tongue extends out of its mouth as if reaching for a taste. The creature doesn’t have the flattened aspect of roadkill; it looks like the victim of something precise: a miniature person has taken his bat to the animal’s head, mugged it and run off with its wallet. It’s some kind of crime, and I stand there for a few minutes, swaying, daydreaming about calling 911 and waiting for the sirens, for people to leave their houses and come into the streets to leer and gossip.

You can find the rest here.

A Binary Assessment of the New Yorker 20 Under 40 Stories

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, “Birdsong”: 1

Chris Adrian, “The Warm Fuzzies”: 0

Daniel Alarcón, “Second Lives”: 0

David Bezmozgis, “The Train of Their Departure”: 1

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, “The Erlking”: 0

Joshua Ferris, “The Plot”: 1

Jonathan Safran Foer, “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly”: 0

Nell Freudenberger, “An Arranged Marriage”: 0

Rivka Galchen, “The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire”: 0

Nicole Krauss, “The Young Painters”: 0

Yiyun Li, “The Science of Flight”: 0

Dinaw Mengestu, “An Honest Exit”: 1

Philipp Meyer, “What You Do Out Here, When You’re Alone”: 1

C. E. Morgan, “Twins”: 1

Téa Obreht, “Blue Water Djinn”: 1

Z Z Packer, “Dayward”: 1

Karen Russell, “The Dredgeman’s Revelation”: 1

Salvatore Scibona, “The Kid”: 1

Gary Shteyngart, “Lenny Hearts Eunice”: 0

Wells Tower, “The Landlord”: 1

Sometime in the early aughts, I read a short story that, in recent months, I’ve been trying to remember. I think it was in The New Yorker or Harpers, though it could’ve been in The Atlantic or still some other magazine. The story was about a man sent to a Soviet prison camp, somewhere in the crushingly frigid north (Arkhangelsk?), where he had to handle toxic waste and do whatever he might to survive. There were brutal guards and even more deadly fellow prisoners and most of the other things that we expect from these stories. There was, I think, a visit to an infirmary, and a camp inmate who let out some unstoppable, frightening scream.

Most of the people at the camp die or succumb to insanity, which is another type of death.

The story is narrated by a Russian man living comfortably in New York. As the story ends, he feels an unrelenting guilt at what his friend went through (who may have died or may have been released when the Soviet Union crumbled). He stares out the window of his apartment, a hundred feet up in a high-rise building, and the sense of loss and regret is so deep and authentically felt; we readers know that this man is blameless, but we also understand his guilt, the guilt of a survivor.

This week, I’ve been searching for this story, typing keywords (gulag, Russia, Soviet Union, lager, prison camp, Murmansk, radiation, nuclear waste, Arkhangelsk) into magazine search engines and coming up with nothing. It’s probably written by a Russian emigre—a male, I’m sure. None of this remembrance may be accurate—the narrator in New York may have been the prisoner, telling his own story—nor may the actual thing be as moving as I remember, but I’d like to find it.